JESUS , THE  CHRIST, 

IN  THE 

LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 


^    G.STANLEY  HALL    ^  ^ 


,WI7 


-i  I    t — 


JESUS,  THE  CHRIST,  IN  THE  LIGHT 
OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

VOL.  II 


Books  by  the  Same  Author 


Adolescence 

Aspects  of  Child  Life  and  Educatcon 

Aspects  of  German  Culture 

Educational  Problems 

Founders  of  Modern  Psychology 

Youth,  Its  Education,  Regimen  and 
Hygiene 


JESUS,  THE  CHRIST, 

IN  THE  LIGHT  OF 

PSYCHOLOGY 

y 


BY 


G.  STANLEY  HALL,  Ph.D.,  LL.D. 

Professor  of  Psychology,  President  of  Clark  University 


VOLUME  II 


Garden  City  New  York 

DOUBLEDAY,  PAGE  &  COMPANY 

1917 


Copyright,  1917,  fry 

DOUBLEDAY,    PaGE    &   CoMPANY 

All  rights  reserved^  including  that  of 

translation  into  foreign  languages, 

including  the  Scandinavian 


CONTENTS 

VOLUME  II 

CHAPTER  PAGE 

VI.    Messianity,  SoNSHip,  AND  THE  Kingdom 326 

VII.    Jesus'  Eschatology,  His  Inner  Character,  Purpose, 

AND  Work 392 

VIII.    Jesus' Ethics  AND  Prayer 471 

IX.    The  Parables  OF  Jesus 517 

X.    The  Miracles 592 

XI.    Death  AND  Resurrection  OF  Jesus 677 


JESUS,  THE  CHRIST,  IN  THE  LIGHT 
OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

VOL.  II 


CHAPTER  SIX 

MESSIANITY,   SONSHTP,  AND  THE  KINGDOM 

I.  Messianism  among  primitive  people — Different  views  among 
the  Hebrews — How  Jesus  came  to  believe  himself  the  Messiah,  and  his 
original  interpretation  of  the  idea  as  he  grew  into  the  role — II.  His 
achievement  in  coming  to  regard  himself  as  the  Son  of  God — -The 
development  of  Yahveh  and  the  kind  of  Deity  he  had  grown  to  be  in 
Jesus'  day — The  unique  time  and  circumstance  for  the  development 
of  the  theanthropic  consciousness — Deity  as  ontological — Outcrops  of 
this  idea  among  children,  primitive  races,  and  its  relation  to  Mana 
theories,  and  the  development  of  a  sense  of  fatherhood — In  what  re- 
spect sonship  was  involved  in  Messianity — How  it  transcended  it — 
God  as  the  race-soul — III.  The  Kingdom  as  the  third  great  achieve- 
ment of  Jesus — Views  of  Kalthoff,  Weisse,  and  others — Contradictions 
in  Jesus'  characterizations  of  the  Kingdom  and  their  explanation — 
In  what  sense  it  was  of  this  earth  and  how  far  transcendent — The 
myths  of  primitive  paradises — The  Kingdom  as  inward — Stages  by 
which  Jesus  came  to  reaHze  that  he  must  die — The  value  and  proof  of 
the  idea  of  genetic  stages — What  it  means  psychologically  to  find  God — 
Jesus'  sociological  ideas — Psychologic  effects  of  the  conviction  that 
the  end  was  at  hand — The  "second  coming" — Kenosis. 

I  Messianity.  W.  D.  Wallis^  in  a  very  interesting  study  of  the  Messiahs 
of  primitive  people,  shows  us  that  in  times  of  hardship  from  any 
•  source  a  great  deliverer  is  expected.  The  claimant  to  this  function 
must  have  qualities  sometimes  pretty  carefully  defined,  and  by  fasting, 
vision,  the  interpretation  of  omens  and  oracles,  he  must  demonstrate 
excessive  spirituality.  He  must  and  does  often  heal  the  sick.  If  once 
accepted  by  the  tribe,  his  soul  becomes  the  embodiment  of  their  col- 
lective soul,  and  he  may  acquire  almost  supreme  authority.  He  can 
cause  the  tribe  to  migrate,  to  dispose  of  its  goods,  to  perform  very 
exceptional  ceremonies,  take  great  risks,  undergo  great  sufferings;  but 
if  he  fails  he  is  at  once  discredited  and  often  slain.  In  about  every 
great  crisis  of  history  of  the  North  American  Indians  some  medicine 

'"Individual  Initiative  and  Social  Compulsion."     Amtr.  Antliropol.,  Oct. -Dec.,  1915.     He  has  also  allowed  me  to 
«ee  a  much  fuller  manuscriiit  study  of  Messiahs. 

326 


MESSIANITY,  SONSHIP,  AND  THE  KINGDOM  327 

man,  and  occasionally  more  than  one,  comes  forward  to  rally  his  people 
to  save  themselves,  to  better  the  present  customs  or  restore  the  old 
ones,  to  expel  the  oppressor,  etc.  The  Messiahs  interpret  the  old 
traditions  as  Jesus  did  prophecy.  They  point  to  an  ideal  state  of 
restoration,  and  it  is  they  that  have  caused  nearly  all  the  outbreaks  so 
justly  dreaded  by  their  neighbours.  Such  Messiahs  were  Pop6  among 
the  Tewas  in  1675  and  Tenskwatawa,  a  Shawnee  warrior  in  1805,  who 
began  his  Messianic  career  in  a  trance  and  was  thought  to  have  brought 
his  people  a  new  revelation  from  the  Master  of  life.  He  denounced 
the  witchcraft  and  medicine  of  his  tribe,  the  firewater  of  the  whites, 
demanded  more  respect  of  parents  and  ancestors.  Smohalla  among 
the  Nez  Perce  found  the  higher  power  and  brought  his  tribe  the  sacred 
message  that  they  should  have  strong  and  sudden  help.  Kanakuk 
among  the  Kickapoos  was  another  mouthpiece  of  the  Great  Spirit  to 
rescue  his  tribe.  Flourishing  tribes  that  do  not  feel  the  outside  pressure 
of  civilization  have  little  need  of  redemption.  The  Navajos,  e.  g., 
rejected  such  gospel  messengers.  The  Apaches,  Delawares,  Ojibways, 
Kiowas,  have  responded  in  some  cases  with  intense  vigour  to  such 
Messianic  appeals.  The  first  record  we  have  in  this  country  is  in  the 
seventeenth  century  when  the  Pueblos  expelled  the  Spaniards.  The 
Sioux  were  infected  by  the  same  fervour  in  the  form  of  a  ghost-dance. 
Among  the  aborigines  of  this  country  there  are  far  more  failures  than 
successes,  and  the  latter  have  greatly  solidified  the  tribe.  Similar 
phenomena  have  been  found  among  the  South  American  Indians,  in 
South  Africa,  and  among  the  Kalmucks.  China  so  well  knows  these 
phenomena  that  it  requires  all  incarnate  gods  in  the  empire  to  register, 
and  "forbids  the  gods  on  the  register  to  be  reborn  anywhere  but  in 
Tibet,"  fearing  warlike  results  very  much  as  Herod  did.  Among  the 
Jev/s  there  have  been  various  Messianic  uprisings,  not  only  against  the 
foreign  yoke  but  against  the  upper  classes,  and  there  are  many  features 
in  the  career  of  Jeanne  d'  Arc  that  illustrate  the  same  principle.  Some 
compare  the  relation  between  the  Messianic  religion  and  the  national 
life  with  that  between  the  brain  and  heart.  The  prophet  very  often 
cajoles  his  people  with  promises  of  an  ideal  state  of  things  after  a  period 
of  hardship  and  tribulation;  buffalo  vAU  come  back;  game  of  all  kinds 
will  abound.  The  cry  is  generally  to  restore  the  old  ways  and  customs, 
but  perhaps  in  an  idealized  form.  Some  convince  their  followers  that 
they  perform  mighty  nature  miracles.     Occasionally  a  time  is  set  for 


328  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

the  sudden  and  divine  inauguration  of  a  new  state  of  things,  generally 
to  the  disaster  of  the  tribe  when  the  prophet's  direction  is  imphcitly  fol- 
lowed. In  1889-90  a  wave  of  intense  Messianic  excitement  swept 
through  several  Southern  States  among  the  negroes,  and  a  number  of 
self-announced  Christs  arose  and  wrought  miracles.  They  received 
many  gifts,  predicted  the  day  of  the  end,  appointed  a  place  to  which 
many  came  on  that  date  to  await  the  great  transformation.  Such 
phenomena  have  a  generic  identity  with  the  Messianism  represented 
by  Jesus,  IMohammed,  the  Mahdi,  and  many  others. 

These  phenomena  raise  the  question  which  was  first  elevated  to 
importance  by  the  school  of  Durkheim,  viz.,  as  to  whether  in  such 
phenomena  the  individual  or  the  group  leads.  Very  many  phenomena 
connected  with  the  various  Mana  theories  now  seem  to  indicate  that  the 
most  primitive  phenomenon  is  a  sense  of  one  great  unifying  principle 
which  springs  out  of  the  collective  soul  when  tribes  celebrate  together, 
in  which  case  the  soul  of  the  individual  is  completely  submerged  in 
that  of  his  community.  Messianic  phenomena,  however,  would  seem 
to  indicate  that  it  is  the  individual  that  influences  the  group.  He 
strives  to  take  into  himself  the  social  mind  of  his  community,  and 
mould  and  guide  it,  for  without  him  the  group  would  be  blind  and 
dumb.  The  group  makes  the  Messiah  possible,  but  in  him  scattered 
rays,  too  dim  to  be  otherwise  effective,  are  focussed,  and  although  his 
power  is  wholly  psychic,  it  may  become  hardly  less  complete  than  that 
of  the  soul  over  the  body.  In  Messianity  we  have,  then,  the  most  per- 
fect of  all  paradigms  of  the  relation  between  leader  and  led.  Each 
creates  and  depends  upon  the  other.  In  no  psychologically  essential 
aspect  did  Scriptural  Messianity  differ  from  that  of  a  more  primitive 
type.  In  the  former,  however,  the  phenomena  are  far  more  clearly 
wrought  out  and  more  adequately  recorded,  and  especially  the  efforts 
of  the  Messiah  are  given  a  higher  spiritual  interpretation,  which  rises 
far  above  the  material  or  political  sphere  in  which  the  cruder  forms  of 
Messianism  find  their  field  of  interpretation.  WaUis  sums  up  by 
saying,  "The  social  seems  merely  a  polarity  or  a  dimension  in  which 
personaHty  finds  meaning  and  by  which  it  is  conditioned  in  its  expres- 
sion." Social  influences  are  responsible  for  the  abihty  of  the  leader  to 
grasp  their  meaning,  and  each  is  equally  creative  of  the  other. 

In  addition  to  456  passages  in  the  Old  Testament,  Edersheim 
collected  558  in  the  Talmud  and  Targums  referring  to  the  Messiah. 


MESSIANITY,  SONSHIP,  AND  THE  KINGDOM  329 

Stanton  collects  400  references  in  the  New  Testament  to  as  many 
passages  in  the  Old,  which  together  he  thinks  define  the  entire  career 
of  the  Messiah  from  his  preexistence  in  heaven  to  his  resumption  of  a 
place  in  the  Trinity  at  God's  right  hand  after  the  Resurrection.  Some 
of  these  are  very  explicit  in  detail.  If  the  Old  Testament  passages  are 
prescriptions  they  leave  httle  room  for  freedom.  His  Kfe  had  been 
written  beforehand,  and  Jesus  in  assuming  Messianity  had  simply  to 
assemble  the  specifications  from  their  many  places  and  contexts  and 
order  his  life  with  fidelity  to  these  old  oracles.  From  this  point  of  view 
we  should  have  to  regard  him  as  a  studious  compiler,  dihgently  seeking 
cues  and  conscientiously  following  them  as  his  rule  of  Hfe.  We  might 
conceive  that  at  some  stage  he  realized  how  many  circumstances  in 
his  past  conformed  to  these  rubrics,  and  from  that  point  he  took  his 
life  in  hand  to  make  the  rest  of  it  conform  more  perfectly.  Thus 
many  a  savage  ruler  is  moulded  by  prescriptions  that  define  all  his 
Tun  and  Haben,  his  licet  and  non  licet,  and  later  accepts  for  himself 
these  taboos  and  exacting  customs  that  may  make  a  king's  life  a  burden 
with  constant  fear  of  transgression.  Some  of  these  requirements 
happily  are  very  generic,  but  they  range  from  the  most  trivial  points  of 
etiquette  to  fundamentals. 

On  the  other  hand,  we  may  conceive  that  all  these  correspondences 
between  the  new  and  the  old  dispensation  hardly  entered  Jesus'  mind. 
He  may  have  lived  out  his  hfe  with  Uttle  thought  of  what  was  or  was 
not  proper  for  a  Messiah,  and  most  of  this  texture  of  cross-referfences 
between  his  career  and  the  sacred  books  of  the  Jews  may  have  been 
woven  later  by  dull  dogmatic  or  Judaizing  followers.  Neither  Paul 
nor  the  synoptists  entirely  ceased  being  Jews  in  becoming  Christians, 
and  they  at  least  sought  to  keep  every  way  open  from  the  old  to  the 
new  dispensation,  as  the  patristic  and  even  scholastic  authors  later 
sought  to  harmonize  the  classics  with  new  Christian  ideals.  So  the 
New  Testament  writers  felt  it  necessary  to  amalgamate  Jesus'  aperqus 
with  the  prophets,  psalmists,  and  historians.  Thus  we  may  conceive 
what  occurred  somewhat  as  follows:  The  original  reporters  of  the 
New  Testament  story  had  been  profoundly  inspired  by  Jesus'  reverence 
for  the  prophets  and  his  luminous  interpretation,  which  made  them 
glow  with  novel  meanings.  They  were  loyal  to  him  and  to  them,  but 
realized  how  he  sublimated  their  lessons  till  they  almost  transcended 
their  own  narrow  ken.    He  had  thus  legitimized  himself  to  them  as  a 


330  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

re-revealer  and  transvaluator  of  the  old  writings.  He  was  the  Theseus 
who  had  drawn  the  sword  of  the  spirit  from  the  old  sacred  tree  of 
knowledge,  the  Ulysses  who  had  demonstrated  his  legitimacy  by  bend- 
ing the  bow  of  Hercules.  So  one  of  the  chief  impressions  he  made 
upon  them  was  as  the  master  of  prophecy.  He  could  bring  out  its 
ravishing  music.  It  spoke  to  him  as  it  spoke  to  no  other.  Its  books 
had  been  more  or  less  sealed  but  he  became  their  great  opener,  as  if  he 
were  the  one  to  whom  they  had  really  been  addressed  across  the  cen- 
turies. As  their  latent  content  now  shone  forth,  his  hearers  had  been 
spellbound,  overwhelmed  with  a  deep  sense  that  all  the  prophetic 
idealism  would  be  realized  and  transferred  from  the  realm  of  poetry 
to  that  of  fact.  They  were  thrilled  by  anticipating  the  early  fruition 
of  the  old  dreams  of  a  long-deferred  hope.  The  day  had  dawned, 
and  expectation  was  on  tiptoe  as  he  talked. 

But  high  meanings  tend  to  fade,  especially  from  minds  on  a  lower 
level.  To  a  mental  vision  that  could  see  only  dimly,  these  glorious 
insights  were  hazy  and  deformed,  and  as  the  years  passed  his  followers 
became  more  incompetent  to  do  full  justice  to  them,  so  that  a  process  of 
transvaluation  downward  into  psychic  equivalents  of  a  lower  order 
began.  When  at  last  the  New  Testament  writers  sought  to  set  it  all 
down  we  have  the  transformations  characteristic  under  such  circum- 
stances, that  are  only  now  coming  to  be  understood.  Some  phrases 
persisted  and  others  were  obliterated.  Thoughts  of  Jesus  lost  their 
precision,  for  they  had  always  been  more  felt  than  understood,  and  so 
the  EvangeUsts  had  to  strive  to  meet  their  task  by  a  cy  pres  modifica- 
tion, if  all  unconsciously,  of  what  Jesus  exactly  had  said  into  the  nearest 
psychokinetic  equivalents  possible  to  their  minds.  These  took  the 
form  of  general  and  specific,  often  very  crass,  correlations  between  the 
incidents  of  Jesus'  fife  and  teaching  and  prophecy,  but  on  the  lower 
plane  of  place  and  incident.  The  true  interpretation  of  prophecy  as 
here  and  now  fulfilled,  then  came  to  expression  in  their  representation 
of  compulsion  to  conform  to  the  vaticinations  of  old  "that  Scripture 
might  be  fulfilled."  The  tendency  to  find  or  make  conformity  was 
strong.  It  might  be  limited  to  trivialities  like  entering  Jerusalem  on 
an  ass  or  dividing  the  garments  by  lot,  or  to  larger  matters  like  the 
virgin  birth,  Davidic  pedigree,  flight  to  Egypt,  slaughter  of  the  Inno- 
cents, appearance  in  the  temple;  but  it  warped  the  real  historicity  of 
all  that  pertained  to  Jesus.    This  apperception  mass  or  complex  in 


MESSIANITY,  SONSHIP,  AND  THE  KINGDOM  331 

the  minds  of  the  Evangelists  would  tend  to  make  them  more  or  less 
alert  to  all  in  their  memories  or  in  the  traditions  that  conformed  to  this 
function,  but  negligent  of  all  that  diverged  from  it.  This  process 
began  in  the  years  immediately  following  Jesus'  death,  during  which  the 
rapprochement  between  the  Messiah  of  the  Old  and  the  Jesus  of  the 
New  Testament  was  growing  toward  a  more  complete  identification. 
It  is  significant  that  the  logia  and  also  the  primitive  Mark  and  John 
show  far  less  effort  to  unify  the  two  than  do  the  synoptists.  If  this 
be  true,  our  problem  is  one  of  restoration,  and  is  difficult. 

The  problem  of  Jesus'  Messianity,  although  one  of  the  most 
unique  and  difficult,  is  not  unsolvable.  Since  Wellhausen's  "History 
of  Israel"  (1878)  it  has  been  realized,  as  never  before,  that  the  most 
remarkable  product  of  the  Hebrew  mind  is  found  in  the  sixteen  Books 
of  the  Prophets.  The  future  was  the  stronghold  of  Jewish  patriotism, 
the  asylum  of  all  its  thwarted  or  delayed  hopes,  the  ark  of  IsraeHtic 
expectation.  The  interpretation  of  the  future  was  the  chief  field  of 
whatever  literature  and  social  philosophy  then  existed.  Poetry  sang 
of  it,  history  pointed  to  it,  behef  in  a  just  God  depended  on  it.  It 
eclipsed  not  only  the  past  but  the  present  in  interest.  It  was  the 
refuge  of  defeated  souls.  Other  races  had  believed  in  a  golden  age,  and 
even  placed  it  in  the  future,  as  Pfleiderer  has  shown.  The  Egyptians 
thought  the  great  phoenix  was  to  appear  and  change  all.  The  Greeks 
realized  that  Pan  was  dead  and  a  new  world-power  about  to  take  the 
helm.  The  Roman  augurs  believed  the  present  period  drawing  to  a 
close.  But  it  was  the  speciality  of  the  Jews  to  establish  a  great  na- 
tional bank  of  the  future  and  to  make  very  heavy  drafts  upon  it. 
From  Amos  to  Obadiah  they  had  expected  another  dispensation  with 
such  fervour  that  the  present  was  made  more  or  less  provisional.  It 
was,  of  course,  variously  interpreted;  perhaps  merely  the  present  wrongs 
would  be  righted,  or  it  was  a  poetic  revelling  in  a  land  flowing  with 
milk  and  honey  where  there  was  no  vrzx,  sin,  or  sickness,  and  perennial 
spring,  a  new  paradise,  no  labour  or  mourning.  Again,  it  was  ex- 
pressed in  measured  denunciations  and  threats  of  a  dies  irae,  as  awful  as 
human  depravity  had  become  hopeless,  or  yet  again  in  mere  penitential 
moods  of  humiliation.  Some  emphasized  the  judgment  motive,  and 
thought  the  new  reign  would  be  inaugurated  by  a  great  assize,  meting 
out  rewards  and  punishments.  Some  thought  physical  nature  \vas  to 
be  remade.    Others  thought  it  would  be  heralded  by  worse  tribulations 


332  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

than  any  ever  before  known.  Elijah  would  appear;  the  nations  of  the 
earth  would  war  upon  the  chosen  ones,  who  would  only  after  unutter- 
able suffering  conquer,  gather  the  dispersed,  and  rebuild  Jerusalem 
under  a  greater  ruler  than  David.  Slowly,  as  Schiirer  has  shown,  some 
of  these  different  interpretations  were  more  or  less  curricuHzed  in  the 
popular  consciousness  and  in  sequent  order,  but  the  Hebrew  mind 
grew  protensive  and  from  Abraham  on  lived  more  and  more  on  prom- 
ises, as  they  had  done  in  Egypt  and  the  wilderness,  because  they  were 
Children  of  the  Covenant.  The  idea  of  the  new  order  of  things  was  so 
inebriating  that  many  feeble  minds  had  become  insane,  and  excitable 
ones  expected  a  speedy  catastrophe.  Some  wondered  why  it  was  so 
long  delayed,  but  all  who  were  dissatisfied  looked  for  a  restoration. 
There  can  be  no  doubt  that  the  Messianic  ideals  of  the  people  were 
very  different  from  those  of  the  prophets.  But  rehgious  consciousness 
in  this  race  was  proleptic.  Despite  all  the  learning  lavished  upon  this 
subject  we  do  not  know  the  extent  of  this  faith  among  the  Jews  at  the 
time  of  Christ,  how  many  held  it,  w^ith  what  intensity,  when  it  was  to 
come,  how  long  it  was  to  last,  how  it  was  to  be  ushered  in,  its  ethnic  or 
geographic  extent.  However  this  be,  there  are  a  few  psychodynamic 
laws  that  apply  to  it,  as  follows : 

1.  It  followed  the  law  of  inverse  relation  between  the  immanent 
and  transcendent.  When  the  kingdom  of  David  and  Solomon  was  at 
the  height  of  its  splendour,  the  faith  in  the  spiritual  Jerusalem  grew 
dim.  But  when  the  national  hearth  became  cold  or  when  the  people 
fell  into  captivity  or  under  the  Roman  rule,  it  became  more  real  as  a 
refuge  of  irrepressible  Semitic  optimism.  The  Messianic  belief  was 
the  form  which  national  faith  in  God's  justice  and  omnipotence  took. 
It  was  an  insurance  policy,  which  if  clung  to  would  make  up  for  all 
loss  and  deficit.  This  whiprow  relation  of  reciprocity  between  the 
real  and  the  ideal,  which  appears  in  a  more  adumbrated  way  in  the 
history  of  other  nations  as  well  as  in  individuals,  was  also  seen  in  the 
procHvity  of  the  Jews  to  fall  into  idolatry  in  the  days  of  prosperity, 
but  when  adversity  came  to  turn  to  the  living  God.  By  this  same 
principle  sickness  weans  from  earth  and  raises  man's  thoughts  to 
heaven. 

2.  Ideas  of  historic  continuity,  developed  in  some  directions,  were 
in  others  strangely  lacking  among  the  Jews.  Creation  was  epochal. 
A  new  period  began  with  the  Flood,  another  with  Abraham,  another 


MESSIANITY,  SONSHIP,  AND  THE  KINGDOM  333 

with  the  captivity,  another  with  the  exodus,  another  with  the  estab- 
lishment in  the  promised  land.  Miracles  like  the  destruction  of  Sodom 
and  of  the  armies  of  Sennacherib  and  Pharaoh  gave  new  turns  to 
events,  so  the  status  quo  was  tentative  like  the  short  tenures  of  the 
year  of  jubilee.  Thus  the  idea  of  dispensations,  perhaps  separated 
by  transforming  events,  gave  a  catastrophic  trait  to  the  Hebrew  con- 
sciousness, although  some  continued  to  believe  that  the  reign  of  the 
Messiah  would  steal  over  the  world  unobser^'-ed,  perhaps  from  some 
obscure  quarter,  and  very  gradually  leaven  the  heart  and  transform  hfe. 

3.  Characterological  differences  predisposed  to  different  ideas  of 
the  Messianic  rule;  for  the  gross  it  would  be  sensual;  for  the  refined 
spiritual;  for  the  poor  it  would  abound  in  gold  and  silver;  for  those 
hungry  for  God,  knowledge  of  him  would  fill  the  earth;  for  those  op- 
pressed, compensation  and  retribution  would  be  most  prominent. 
Those  of  a  spurty  diathesis  might  interpret  it  as  coming  suddenly, 
while  for  others  it  would  be  a  natural  evolution.  For  visionaries  it 
would  stand  forth  with  every  detail  with  which  the  imagination  can 
invest  ideals,  while  for  prosaic  minds  it  remained  a  beautiful  cloud- 
dream. 

4.  It  might  be  very  far  or  near.  The  competition  with  other 
national  deities  with  whom  Yahveh  was  brought  into  comparison  by 
their  conquerors  tended  to  make  him  afar,  because  piety  exalted  him 
above  them  all.  God  had  withdrawn,  hid  his  face,  his  very  name  was 
secret.  And  although  the  Jews  never  gasped  up  into  the  inane  by  the 
Greek  method  of  ecstasy,  the  Semitic  fancy  had  long  before  peopled 
the  hungry  void  between  God  and  man  with  a  series  of  intermediate 
beings,  principaUties,  powers,  angelic  orders,  and  these  also  tended  to 
keep  God  at  a  distance  by  themselves  doing  his  work  in  the  world. 
All  the  apocalyptic  and  eschatological  conceptions  w^re  expressions  of 
a  consuming  desire  to  bring  God  back  to  man,  and  such  ethnic  tension 
is  a  prayer  which  always  answers  itself. 

5.  The  chief  feature  in  the  Messianic  realm  was  ethical.  God's 
justice  was  to  be  vindicated.  The  culmination  of  human  affairs  was 
not  to  be  despair,  nor  was  it  formulated  according  to  any  program  of 
pessimism  save  for  the  wicked.  Nothing  but  good  awaited  the 
righteous.  Thus  optimism  and  pessimism  were  both  true,  one  for  the 
good  and  the  other  for  the  bad.  The  worse  things  were,  the  more 
radical  would  be  the  Messianic  metamorphosis. 


334  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

Precious  concepts  like  these  lay  very  close  about  the  hearts  of 
those  Hebrews  who  were  truest  to  the  national  ideal.  Faith  in  some 
form  of  them  was  the  essence  of  the  highest  reUgious  life.  They  ma}/ 
have  been  held  with  peculiar  intensity  by  a  httle  circle  of  receptive 
waiting  souls  closest  to  Jesus.  Perhaps  the  new  realm  might  break 
out  with  dazzling  brilliancy  at  the  next  Passover  in  Jerusalem.  Any 
unusual  event  might  be  its  signal  to  those  conventicle  brooders  who 
kept  themselves  in  a  state  of  ideality.  There  can  be  little  doubt  that 
this  was  the  chief  culture  atmosphere  in  which  Jesus  grew,  and  it  is  no 
wonder  that  it  has  suggested  the  most  fruitful  of  all  recent  interpreta- 
tions of  Christology. 

The  most  enlightened  common  sense  now  inclines  to  the  view  that 
Jesus  lived  out  his  early  Hfe  completely  under  the  influence  of  his  en- 
vironment, that  his  first  conception  of  his  Father's  business  was  car- 
pentering, that  he  had  a  completely  natural  development,  and  had 
known  the  Messianic  ideals  objectively  long  before  he  felt  any  special 
personal  relation  to  them.  We  cannot  agree  with  Lagarde  that  Jesus 
never  thought  himself  the  Messiah,  nor  with  Holtzmann  that  it  was 
merely  a  matter  of  ideality.  But  whenever  he  first  conceived  it  with 
reference  to  himself  it  must  have  given  him  great  pause.  The  modesty 
of  one  who  does  not  yet  know  his  genius  would  prompt  him  to  hold 
back.  Practical  sagacity  might  suggest  that  the  times  were  not  ripe, 
or  the  difficulties  were  too  great.  It  was  not  merely  editing  an  old 
traditional  story,  as  Goethe  sought  to  embody  the  Faust  legends  or 
Sue  those  of  the  Wandering  Jew.  It  was  not  assuming  a  title  by  per- 
forming some  predetermined  feat  like  that  of  Theseus  or  Siegfried. 
Nor  was  it  merely  playing  a  role  to  meet  the  popular  expectations  of  the 
return  of  some  great  hero,  nor  a  new  sense  of  being  an  agent  of  fate  or 
destiny.  It  was  not  working  out  a  national  task  of  reconstruction 
like  those  which  Stein,  Jahn,  and  Scharnhorst  undertook  for  Germany 
after  the  Napoleonic  wars,  nor  obeying  the  call  of  patriotism  by  hark- 
ing back  to  ancient  prophecy,  as  of  a  virgin  deliverer  in  the  days  of 
Jeanne  d'Arc.  Neither  was  it  the  emergence  of  some  great  Mahatma 
from  his  obscurity,  nor  interpreting  the  mad  ravings  of  the  Pythian 
prophetess,  or  the  whispering  of  the  leaves  of  the  Dodona  oak.  It  has 
some  analogues  to  all  of  these,  but  was  vaster.  It  was  impossible  to 
fulfil  any  single  interpretation  of  Messianity  without  disappointing 
others;  and  so  lacking  in  coherence  were  even  the  canonical  foregleams 


MESSIANITY,  SONSHIP,  AND  THE  KINGDOM  335 

of  it  that  any  detailed  interpretation  was  sure  to  make  more  enemies 
than  it  could  make  friends.  The  great  hope  was  not  a  prepared  mould, 
like  a  Cinderella  slipper,  which  the  right  individual  would  completely 
fit  or  fill.  To  realize  it  required  the  greatest  perspicacity  into  the 
things  of  the  soul,  a  genial  creativeness,  marking  the  advent  of  the 
successful  artist  or  poet  of  poets  in  this  domain,  that  should  move  in 
the  midst  of  all  this  plastic  material,  like  the  spirit  of  God  upon  the 
pristine  waters. 

Of  course  we  never  shall  exactly  know  how  Jesus  felt  when  he  fully 
realized  that  the  glorious  nimbus  of  Messianity  was  within  his  reach. 
He  was  not  intoxicated  with  it  as  many  had  been  before,  for  it  seems  to 
have  been  a  favourite  form  of  paretic  delusions  of  greatness.  He  did 
not  put  aside  this  thrice  kingly  crown  because  he  saw  dangers,  for  his 
pneumatic  self  perhaps  urged  him  on  by  making  him  feel  called  to  it. 
Perhaps  he  rather  felt  that  he  must  justify  not  the  assumption  but  the 
refusal  of  Messianity.  Did  he  use  it  as  a  means  for  accomplishing 
other  ends?  Had  he  already  grown  so  exactly  into  it  that  he  would 
have  been  what  he  was  apart  from  this  conception,  and  merely  found 
that  it  coincided  with  what  he  already  was?  Did  it  simply  give  him  a 
higher  form  of  self-knowledge  because  of  the  coincidence  of  objective 
ideal  with  subjective  spontaneity?  Was  he  more  or  less  free,  or  was 
there  a  higher  consciousness  experienced  or  reflectively  realized?  In- 
deed, was  there  any  distinct  act  of  choice,  resolve,  decision,  weighing 
results,  or  did  the  sense  of  Messianity  grow  in  him  unconsciously,  even 
though  the  realization  was  sudden?  Did  all  that  was  in  him  go  up 
and  out  into  Messianity  and  was  his  psychic  legitimacy  complete? 
Was  this  consciousness  in  its  final  form  the  exact  expression  of  just 
what  and  all  that  he  was  by  birth  or  heredity?  Under  the  influence  of 
this  general  expectancy  did  his  nature  expand  further  beyond  the 
dimensions  of  mere  prophethood  than  it  would  have  done  in  another 
psychic  environment,  or  was  there  any  degree  of  accommodation? 

All  we  can  answer  is  that  he  did  for  the  Old  Testament  Christology 
what,  and  more  than,  the  higher  criticism  now  seeks  to  do  for  Scripture, 
deUvering  its  spirit  from  the  bondage  of  its  letter,  not  by  scholarship 
but  by  a  more  vital  psychological  re-realization  and  revelation  of  its 
inner  content.  Perhaps  Kahler  is  right,  that  what  we  really  worship 
is  not  entirely  the  Jesus  of  the  Gospels  but  the  larger  Christ  of  the  whole 
Bible,  of  which  Jesus  gave  us  the  germinal  principle.    Perhaps  we 


336  JESUS   IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

shall  have  to  discuss  with  Nosgen  whether  the  whole  of  Messianity 
found  expression  in  Jesus  so  that  the  real  kenosis  is  that  this  great  ideal 
was  in  a  sense  self-pauperizing.  If  this  be  true,  all  those  who  advance 
the  cause  of  Jesus  are  developing  the  hope  of  ancient  Judea.  Neither 
Buddha,  Confucius,  Mohammed,  nor  any  other  great  religious  creator 
had  any  such  wealth  of  preformations  or  anticipations,  and  therefore 
no  such  culture  momentum  behind  him.  This  prelusive  ethnic 
hunger  drew  out  the  noblest  aspirations,  for  it  was  a  great  ideal  await- 
ing realization  and  beckoning  to  the  heights  of  humanity.  In  this  race, 
small,  with  Hmited  notions  of  the  great  cosmos,  and  within  a  few  years, 
a  process  of  intensive  greatness  occurred  which  is  the  world's  classic 
illustration  of  the  power  of  the  religio  pectoris  to  supplement  all  defects 
of  time,  place,  circumstance,  and  person  by  vision  and  idealism. 

Jesus  might  have  sought  to  reahze  Messianity  in  the  high  priest- 
hood with  its  splendour  and  mediatorial  function,  with  its  great  appeal 
to  the  imagination,  but  the  priesthood  was  for  Levites,  and  he  was  not 
of  their  tribe  nor  even  a  Pharisee  but  a  layman.  He  was  neither 
scholar  nor  theologian,  and  the  atmosphere  of  legality  repelled  him. 
He  might  have  chosen  the  prophetic  role,  usually  at  enmity  with  the 
hierarchy.  The  majestic  figures  of  the  prophets  emerging  from  the 
desert,  charged  with  spiritual  messages  like  Zarathustra,  especially  at 
great  crises,  must  have  made  a  powerful  appeal.  Again,  the  role  of  the 
wonderworker  was  one  of  the  most  popular  of  all  the  attributes  as- 
cribed to  the  Messiah.  The  Jews  never  forgot  what  Yahveh  did  at 
Sinai,  how  EKjah  drew  down  fire,  and  the  sun  obeyed  Joshua.  Nature 
was  not  yet  tamed  by  laws,  and  all  clamoured  for  a  sign.  This  role 
was  partly  accepted  by  Jesus  so  far  as  he  overcame  man's  greatest 
enemies,  death  and  disease,  although  medicine  was  then  exorcism  and 
all  nervous  ailments  were  possession.  Thus  he  fulfilled  this  type  of 
expectation  more  than  any  of  the  others.  The  most  insistent  and 
common  idea  was  that  the  Messiah  should  be  a  warrior  king  like  Saul, 
and  thus  he  had  to  be  a  son  of  David,  so  that  his  advent  could  be  a  roy- 
alist restoration.  The  dream  of  Jesus'  age,  as  Holtzmann  perhaps 
best  puts  it,  was  deliverance  from  an  alien  yoke  and  taxation,  as  Moses 
had  delivered  Israel  from  Pharaoh.  This  idea  was  most  of  all  thwarted 
by  Jesus,  for  his  kingship  was  entirely  inward. 

What,  then,  was  his  interpretation?    In  a  single  word  it  was  in 
wardness.     The  glorious  triumphs  of  the  Messiah  must  be  realized  in 


MESSIANITY,  SONSHIP,  AND  THE  KINGDOM  337 

the  human  soul.  The  new  Jerusalem  is  the  city  of  Mansoul.  The 
law  is  all  in  the  heart.  This  involution  or  subjectivization  constituted 
the  great  work  of  Jesus  in  this  domain.  Never  was  anything  done  that 
assumed  such  depth,  breadth,  and  capacity  of  the  soul,  or  that  was  so  cal- 
culated to  magnify  our  timid  narrow  psychology.  All  the  Messianic 
ideas  have  ample  space  for  reahzation  in  the  immanent  domain  of  the 
human  spirit.  More  than  this,  all  history  is  worthless  or  valuable 
just  in  proportion  as  it  is  resolved  into  a  t>^ology  of  the  processes 
that  take  place  in  that  world  which  Kant  taught  us  to  call  intelHgible 
rather  than  empirical.  Each  man  is  prophet,  priest,  king,  healer  of 
himself.  Compared  to  this  inwardization  Berkeley's  subjecti\dzation 
of  the  outer  world  is  only  a  parody,  as  the  magicians  aped  the  miracles 
of  Moses.  As  subject  knows  object  only  as  a  system  of  meanings,  so 
Jewish  history  is  transmuted  into  ethical  and  rehgious  experience. 
Nothing  ever  implied  such  a  high  valuation  of  man's  psychic  power, 
and  this  greatly  reinforced  by  transference  the  behef  in  immortality. 
Its  echo  is  still  heard  in  the  ideals  of  the  Church  invisible,  not  made 
with  hands,  although  all  this  an  age  like  our  own,  so  utterly  absorbed 
in  externals,  is  perhaps  less  able  to  comprehend  than  any  other  age. 
This  involved  great  transvaluation  of  values.  Of  this  great 
reversal  Buddha's  renunciation  is  only  the  darker,  sadder  form.  It  is 
not  easy  to  see  how  the  poor  are  rich,  or  the  rich  poor,  why  the  meek 
are  proud,  and  the  proud  humble;  how  pain  brings  joy,  the  conquered 
conquer;  how  the  vilest  sinner  may  be  purer  than  the  perfect  con- 
ventionalist. Only  when  we  understand  these  things  can  we  understand 
the  sense  in  which  Jesus  realized  Messianic  hopes.  This  thesis  of  Jesus 
should  appeal  with  peculiar  force,  but  does  not,  to  those  psychologists 
who  tliink  meanly  of  the  soul  or  deem  it  a  mere  epiphenomenon  or 
mainly  noetic,  or  nothing  but  a  mirror  or  record  of  outer  facts.  Again, 
the  great  founder  of  the  inner  kingdom  of  faith  gives  us  a  culminating 
example  of  what  every  race  should  do  for  its  history  and  ideals.  He 
answers  the  question  how  races  and  ethnic  stocks  can  remain  peren- 
nially vital  and  growing,  and  escape  the  decay  and  death  which  have 
seemed  to  be  the  destiny  of  all  the  great  nations  of  the  past.  Racial 
and  national  immortality  are  assured  only  by  inwardly  assimilating 
and  interpreting  on  ever  higher  planes  the  earlier  achievements  and 
ideals  of  the  race,  by  perpetually  sublimating  fact  into  meaning,  using 
it  as  a  symbol  of  higher  future  truths,  ever  trying  to  reproduce  the  his- 


338  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

tory  of  the  past  but  in  a  transfigured  way,  so  that  all  that  went  before 
seems  prophecy,  and  all  that  follows  its  fulfilment.  Human  records 
must  have  this  incessant  re-interpretation  and  re-revelation,  just  as 
human  Ufe  is  made  more  effective  by  it  as  we  see,  e.  g.,  in  Goethe. 
Either  for  lack  of  great  minds  or  of  incentives  thereto  this  development 
has  been  arrested  or  there  have  been  retrogression  or  so  many  dead 
and  stagnant  periods  and  so  many  dead  nations.  We  have  here  a  re- 
cipe of  ever  progressive  growth  and  development  for  races. 

Thus  in  realizing  Messianity  within,  Jesus  transcended  individual- 
ity, and  his  soul  became  totemic  of  his  race,  the  palladium  of  its  ideals. 
In  gathering  this  into  himself  he  also  diffused  his  self  into  the  larger  self 
of  the  gens  and  became  its  generalized  type,  so  that  his  identity  was 
expanded  and  merged  into  that  of  his  people.  All  its  good  predicates 
became  his.  All  that  was  significant  in  its  history  must  be  explained, 
at  least  symbolically,  in  his  own  Hfe.  But  all  this  vastation  of  soul 
involved  the  beginning  of  a  reversal  of  all  the  processes  of  incarnation. 
It  was  the  doom  of  the  body  as  the  principle  of  individuation.  As 
Plato  conceived  philosophy  as  love  of  death,  so  as  Jesus'  soul  ceased  to 
be  individual  and  became  racial,  his  body,  which  could  not  incorporate 
the  race,  must  die,  and  the  larger  body,  viz.,  the  conamunity — that  is, 
the  disciples,  the  elect,  the  Church — must  take  its  place.  The  soul 
such  as  his  had  become  needed  a  new  and  larger  incarnation,  not  in  one 
person  but  in  a  group.  This  reincarnation  of  soul  he  described  figur- 
atively as  the  Holy  Spirit  that  could  only  come  after  his  death,  which 
was  necessary  to  set  it  free,  for  the  Spirit  is  only  his  soul  freed  from  the 
body.  Perhaps  a  better  modern  trope  or  simile  of  this  process  would 
be  to  call  it  a  higher  procreation  which  having  borne  and  transmitted 
the  immortal  germ  plasm,  leaves  the  specialized  soma  to  die  because 
as  an  instrument  it  has  done  its  work  and  so  must  be  sloughed  off  like  a 
husk  which  is  of  no  further  use  and  may  become  an  encumbrance. 
Compared  with  the  new,  higher  Hfe  his  soul  had  kindled,  his  corpo- 
reity had  become  senescent  and  moribund.  His  psyche  had  outgrown 
his  soma,  and  could  not  become  a  diffusive  power  in  the  disciples  and 
their  followers  and  successors  while  it  was  imprisoned  in  its  sarcous 
tenement,  so  that  in  becoming  the  Messiah  the  thanatic  processional 
had  already  begun.  As  others  struggled  to  live,  the  struggle  to  die 
had  now  begun  in  the  depths  of  his  soul.  Unique  as  this  was,  in  him  it 
is  intelligible  and  not  without  analogies  in  human  experience.     The 


MESSIANITY,  SONSHIP,  AND  THE  KINGDOM  339 

sense  of  Messianity  he  described,  not  by  calling  himself  the  generic  or 
ideal  Jew  or  type-man,  but  by  means  of  the  more  tropical  and  less 
exact  phrase,  Son  of  Man.  He  might  have  called  himself  the  Father 
of  Man,  of  a  new  type  truest  to  the  idea  of  humanity,  or  the  best  repre- 
sentative of  the  genus. 

As  Jesus  grew  into  the  Messianic  idea  his  individual  consciousness 
gradually  passed  into  the  larger  consciousness  of  the  group  or  race, 
and  he  eventually  came  to  identify  himself  with  it.  He  came  to 
think,  feel,  and  act  in  super-individual  or  genetic  terms.  He  inter- 
preted this  supervening  race-consciousness  in  Iiimself  ambiguously, 
partly  as  Godhead  and  partly  as  the  Kingdom.  Following  the  inveter- 
ate projective  hypostatizing  habit,  he  interpreted  it  on  the  one  hand  as 
his  heavenly  Father  with  whom  he  grew  into  unique  oneness.  This 
experience  was  the  knell  of  his  own  personaHty,  as  distinct  from  and 
independent  of  the  Father.  Even  his  individuality,  however  perfect, 
could  not  express  God,  who  as  humanity  itself  transcends  all  hmita- 
tions  inherent  in  any  single  personaHty.  On  the  other  hand,  the  Jo- 
hannin  phrases  expressing  his  relation  to  the  Father,  as  we  shall  see, 
can  be  so  arranged  as  to  show  every  stage  of  progress  from  utter 
subordination  to  equality  and  identity  until  his  individual  ego,  now 
entirely  evacuated,  marches  on  to  death  in  order  that  the  undiminished 
fulness  of  God  may  take  its  place.  Thus  he  illustrates  psychic  euthan- 
asia.    God  is  Mansoul  transcendentalized.^ 

II.  The  Sonship.  A  second  great  achievement  was  that  Jesus 
grew  to  regard  himself  as  Son  of  God.  This  was  another  experience 
not  unique  in  kind  but  far  transcending  any  other  approximation  to  it 
in  degree.     This  we  must  now  consider. 

Perhaps  the  most  distinctive  trait  of  Jesus'  personality,  the  one 
that  has  always  overtopped  his  teachings,  is  the  fact  that  he  beUeved 
himself  to  be  and  was  thought  by  his  followers  to  stand  nearer  than  any 
other  to  God.  This  conviction  was  probably  the  most  basal  and  deep- 
est thing  in  his  soul,  and  constituted  his  divine  sonship.  Harnack^ 
declares  that  no  psychology  can  ever  tell  us  how  Jesus  attained  this 
insight.    Here,  he  says,  research  ceases,  and  this  must  forever  remain  a 

iQf  the  voluminous  literature  on  the  subject  see  as  convenient  in  English:  V.  H.  Stanton:  "The  Jewish  and  Chris- 
tian Messiah."  1886,  399  p.  S.  Mathews:  "The  Messianic  Hope  in  the  New  Testament."  New  York,  1905,  338  p.  E. 
Fiehm:  "Messianic  Prophecy."  1900,  336  p.  C.  H.  Briggs:  "Messianic  Prophecy."  1895,  SiQP-  C.  H.  Cornill:  "The 
Prophets  of  Israel."  1895, 193  p.  J.  M.  P.  Smith:  "The  Prophet  and  His  Problem."  1916,  344  p.  See  also  V.  VOlter:  "Jesus 
der  Menschensohn."  1914,  113  p.  D.  Carl  Stange:  "Das  Fr6mmigkeitsideal  der  modernen  Theologie."  1907,  it  p. 
F.  Moerchen:  "Die  Psychologic  der  Heiligkeit."  1908,  47  p.  See  also  his  "Zur  psychiatrischen  Betrachtung  des  ttber- 
lieferten  Christusbildes,"  in  MonaisschriftfUr  die  kirchliche  Praxis.    Oct.,  1906. 

"■^'Das  Wesen  des  Christeutums."    1901, 189  p. 


340  JESUS   IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

mystery.  This  we  cannot  admit  or  believe.  Were  it  so,  the  loss  or 
absence  of  this  knowledge  would  not  only  be  unutterably  sad  but  it 
would  leave  Christianity  with  a  hiatus  between  itself  and  God,  and 
also  between  itself  and  man,  as  a  thing  apart  and  dissociated,  and  there- 
fore forever  unintelligible  and  incredible.  In  fact,  the  sense  of  sonship 
was  attained  through  a  normal  development  of  the  vita  religiosa,  and 
although  it  occurred  in  the  greatest  psychic  altitude,  it  was  as  natural 
as  spring.  True,  Jesus  kept  no  journal  intime,  and  we  cannot  tell  how 
much  of  this  process  was  spontaneous  unfoldment,  impelled  only 
by  the  nisus  back  of  all  development,  and  how  much  was  the  result 
of  struggle,  search,  and  victory.  We  find  many  of  the  same  uncer- 
tainties as  to  the  precise  way  in  which  he  reached  the  sense  of  sonship, 
that  we  have  seen  exist  concerning  how  he  attained  Messianity. 
Much,  however,  as  we  long  for  a  fuller  record  of  the  hidden  processes 
of  his  soul,  it  is  not  difficult  to  understand  and  even  to  indicate  the 
psychogenetic  stages  that  led  him  to  conscious  deity.  To  do  this  v/e 
must,  however,  first  recall  one  of  the  considerations  above  that  bore 
on  the  problem  of  Messianity,  viz.,  that  a  race  that  does  not  produce 
great  representative  men  and  leaders  at  each  stage  of  its  development 
always  suffers  arrest  and,  in  the  end,  degeneration.  A  race  has  been 
defined  as  a  device  of  nature  to  produce  one  or  more  men  of  a  high  or- 
der. As  its  culture  becomes  richer,  ever-increasing  ability  is  needed 
for  its  guides.  Because  the  demands  for  increasing  superiority  in  fit 
leaders  were  not  met  in  season,  the  great  ethnic  stocks  of  the  past 
declined,  like  exotic  plants  that  sprouted  but  could  not  bear  fruit 
or  even  come  to  blossom.  Again,  outer  forms,  conventions,  too  much 
legaHty,  external  rites,  encrusting  internal  meanings — these  are  like 
specialized  somatic  tissue  which  loses  germinal  power  until  the  corpse 
is  evolved.  To  such  a  condition  Jesus  as  Messiah  brought  regenera- 
tion by  subordinating  form  to  content  and  becoming  the  unipersonal 
entelechy  of  his  race,  its  higher  monad  or  microcosm,  entitled  to  speak 
with  the  voice  of  all  the  prophets  at  once,  so  that  what  had  been  phylo- 
genetic  processes  now  took  in  his  person  an  ontogenetic  form. 

But  what  was  the  Hebrew  deity  whose  son  Jesus  thought  he  be- 
came? Yahveh,  at  first  the  God  of  the  Kenite  tribe  near  Sinai,  was  as 
unique  as  were  the  Hebrews  who  adopted  him,  who  chose  him,  or,  as 
they  always  ascribed  the  initiative  to  the  Divine,  whom  he  had  chosen. 
Each  could  say  to  the  other  in  the  phrase  of  the  worshipper  as  in- 


MESSIANITY,  SONSHIP,  AND  THE  KINGDOM  341 

scribed  on  the  Orphic  tablets,  "  I  am  of  thy  race."  He  was  essentially 
the  God  of  the  gens,  and  to  each  member  of  it  he  was  his  great  clans- 
man and  kinsman,  his  personified  ideal,  destiny,  genius.  Originally 
regarded  as  hardly  less  awe-inspiring  than  the  Akkadian  Maskim  from 
which  some  elements  of  his  nature  were  derived,  the  mystic  tetragram 
that  stood  for  a  name  too  sacred  to  be  spoken  suggested  etymolog- 
ically  the  lofty,  strong,  eternal  one,  and  he  was  always  associated  in 
the  Hebrew  mind  with  the  sublime  and  to  them  novel  mountain 
phenomena  at  Sinai.  Although  the  God  of  the  ancestors,  Abraham, 
Isaac,  and  Jacob,  though  not  in  a  way  that  suggests,  as  some  have 
thought,  traces  of  the  Spencer-Lange  ancestor-worship  theory  of  the 
origin  of  religion,  and  although  long  worshipped  with  offerings,  there  is 
Uttle  evidence  that  he  ever  sat  at  the  table  as  the  guest  of  his  devotees 
or  that  sacrifices  were  ever  made  to  him  under  either  of  the  formulae, 
do  ut  abias  or  do  ut  das,  phrases  now  sometimes  used  to  distinguish 
between  the  earlier,  e.  g.,  pre-Dionysian,  and  the  later  Olympic  re- 
hgions  in  Greece.  Yahveh  was  also  both  a  battle-cry  and  a  God  of 
war.  Once  he  had  accepted  human  sacrifices.  He  had  adopted  many 
of  the  rites  of  the  Canaanitic  Baal,  and  had  thus  become  also  God  of 
the  soil  and  its  fruits,  and  husband  of  the  land,  being  always  psychically 
consanguineous  mth  his  people.  His  worship  was  never  domestic, 
and  his  sacrifices  never  on  the  hearths  and  altars  of  homes;  but  his 
culture  was  always  a  social  rather  than  an  individual,  or  even  a  family 
matter.  Religion  was  not  yet  personal,  but  merely  "the  tie  that 
binds." 

From  these  very  humble,  not  to  say  barbaric,  beginnings,  Yahveh 
grew  in  complexity  and  exaltation  of  character  with  the  growth  of  the 
race,  reflecting  its  most  effective  subjectivity,  which  came  to  be  en- 
dowed not  only  with  all  the  supreme  ethical  values  but  with  indepen- 
dent objectivity.  For  primitive  man  and  the  folk-soul  particularly,  to 
know  means  to  posit  objectively,  a  tendency  arising  particularly  from 
the  irresistible  ejective  habit  of  sense  perception.  Races  especially 
must  project  outward  their  most  intimate  nature  to  really  know  it,  for 
what  is  man  v/ithout  an  object?  In  religion  differences  between  sub- 
ject and  object  are  most  constantly  changing.  Kalthoff  urges  that  the 
deeper  we  penetrate  into  this  domain  the  more  the  subjective  predom- 
inates over  the  objective.  Yahveh  became  more  than  tribal,  more 
than  the  embodiment  of  the  moral  ideas  of  the  Hebrew  stock.     He 


342  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

was  the  "essential  truth  of  Jewish  man."  Hence,  by  the  law  of 
fission  or  bifurcation,  the  transcendent,  which  is  always  secondary,  had 
emanated  from  the  soul  of  the  race.  What  the  chosen  people  re- 
nounced for  themselves  in  power,  wisdom,  and  hoHness,  they  not  only 
ascribed  to  but  enjoyed  in  their  deity.  He  was  one,  because  they 
were  the  pure,  unmixed  race;  supreme,  because  they  held  themselves 
to  be  the  best  stirp  in  the  world;  just,  because  he  embodied  their  con- 
viction that  good  and  evil  would  both  be  recompensed  in  this  life.  He 
was  the  celestial  party  to  the  great  covenant;  vindictive,  yet  judicious; 
jealous,  but  kindly;  stern  in  discipline,  but  with  a  parental  heart. 
To  this  personation  of  the  higher  life  Abraham  was  called  to  devote 
himself  with  abandon.  Some  of  the  prophets  gave  Yahveh  almost 
cosmic  dimensions,  and  the  Psalms  made  him  not  only  Lord  but  Creator 
of  nature.  Yet  he  was  a  particularist,  exacting  in  all  matters  of  sacri- 
fice and  rites,  and  enforcing  nice  distinctions  between  what  was  kodish 
and  taboo.  His  personahty  later  became  so  multiplex  that  it  was  hard 
to  define,  and  if  he  did  not  become  merely  a  vinculum  to  include  a 
larger  number  of  attributes  these  were  so  distinct  as  to  suggest  heno- 
theism  among  the  qualities  enshrined  within  his  nature.  He  had  not 
only  chosen  but  trained  his  people  by  successes  and  calamities,  fears 
and  hopes.  He  had  watched  over  them,  and  had  always  been  on  hand 
in  emergencies  with  special  deliverances.  Thus  the  worship  of  Yahveh 
meant  respect  for  the  very  highest  ethnic  conceptions  and  convictions. 
We  can  see  that  the  assumption  of  sonship  to  such  a  being,  instead 
of  being  involved  with  and  inseparable  from  the  problem  of  Messianity, 
as  Baldensperger,  e.  g.,  thinks  it  to  be,  would  mark  a  distinct  advance, 
although  it  would  be  a  natural  if  not  inevitable  next  step,  if  advance 
there  was  to  be.  As  the  Jews  were  children  of  Yahveh's  choice,  so 
Jesus  as  their  type-man  was  his  Son  in  a  peculiar  sense.  As  such,  all 
the  lavish  care  bestowed  upon  them  by  their  Lord  would  converge 
and  concentrate  upon  him  as  its  focus.  Jesus  was  the  apical  blossom 
for  the  sake  of  which  the  Divine  Creator  had  so  long  watered,  pruned, 
transplanted,  and  dug  about  the  parent  stem.  He  was  chosen  from 
among  his  race  just  as  it  had  been  chosen  of  old,  so  that  he  now  stood 
in  a  position  related  to  his  kinsmen  somewhat  like  theirs  toward  the 
gentiles.  He  was  sacrosanct,  or  doubly  set  apart,  as  well  as  beloved, 
and  this  relation  was  most  exactly  conceived  as  filial.  Thus  no  object- 
ive event  (such  as  Peter's  confession,  the  transfiguration,  or  the  voice 


MESSIANITY,  SONSHIP,  AND  THE  KINGDOM  343 

from  heaven)  nor  any  pathological  subjective  experience  led  Jesus  on 
to  this  momentous  next  step,  but  an  ineluctable  inner  necessity  which 
was  genetic  because  it  was  an  advanced  stage  of  development  along  the 
line  of  his  previous  psychic  growth.  It  was  at  the  same  time  a  logical 
conclusion  from  two  premises.  Yahveh  is  the  Father  of  the  Jews, 
and  Jesus  is  their  Messiah.  Thus  only  one  already  consciously  the 
Messiah  could  have  become  Son  of  God  with  any  plenary  conviction. 
This  of  course  involved  the  utmost  expansion  and  elevation  of  soul, 
and  many  new  lines  of  spiritual  development.  Natural  as  it  all  was, 
and  true  to  all  we  know  of  the  higher  psychology  and  anthropology, 
it  was  unique,  as  much  so,  indeed,  as  was  the  development  of  man  on 
the  monophyletic  theory,  which  assumes  that  at  only  one  particular 
point  in  time  and  place  did  the  primitive  man  evolve  out  of  the  higher 
anthropoids.  So  this  process  could  never  have  taken  place  in  the 
world  before,  and  we  can  hardly  conceive  it  possible  again. 

For  instance,  the  conviction  of  sonship  could  not  have  broken 
forth  toward  any  deity  that  was  not  in  many  respects  tribal.  Again, 
no  individual  could  normally  grow  into  the  sense  of  sonship,  unique 
like  that  of  Jesus,  who  had  not  already  in  a  sense  embodied  his  race  in 
himself.  That  race,  too,  must  be  pure,  its  stock  eugenic,  persistent, 
ascendent.  The  conceptions  of  the  cosmos  had  to  be  more  or  less 
narrow  to  make  the  process  possible  and  also  to  give  it  depth  and 
intensity.  Just  this  deity,  individual,  race,  moment,  stage,  had  to 
concur.  Thus  the  problem  of  sonship  was  reduced  to  its  simplest 
and  most  favourable  terms.  If  we  delocaUze  or  detemporize  the 
process,  or  dissociate  the  solution  from  its  historic  environment,  the 
understanding  of  it  all  will  escape  us.  True,  myth  tells  us  of  sons 
of  God  galore,  that  have  sprung  from  the  immortal  descendants  of 
heaven  who  consorted  with  the  daughters  of  men,  but  the  sonship  of 
Jesus  has  nothing  really  in  common  with  this,  nor  is  his  sonship  pro- 
creative  save  in  the  above  sense;  so  that  the  Immaculate  Conception  is 
only  a  symbol  but  of  a  distinctly  different  order,  a  figure  of  speech 
taken  Hterally.  Jesus'  relations  to  his  Father  were  purely  spiritual 
and  not  spermatic.  From  every  pragmatic  point  of  view  sonship  did 
involve  some  reduction  of  Yahveh.  We  find  in  the  New  Testament 
no  such  magnificats  of  God  as  abound  in  the  prophets,  as  a  being 
infinite  in  time,  space,  and  perfection,  omnipresent,  omnipotent,  creat- 
ing all  things,  awful  and  infinitely  transcending  human  concepts. 


344  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

Indeed,  there  is  little  left  of  the  numen  tremefidum  of  Sinai,  with  all  his 
plenitude  of  superhuman  and  supernatural  predicates.  Deity  for 
Jesus  is  the  still  small  voice  of  man.  He  brought  the  twihght  of  the 
Semite  Yahveh,  as  God  the  Father  passed  over  into  the  Son  by  whose 
generation  his  own  being  is  diminished.  Not  that  Jesus  deliberately 
reduced  the  God-idea  to  make  it  coincide  with  his  own  personal  con- 
sciousness; but  he  only  felt  that  all  possible  revelation  of  him  must 
henceforth  be  in  human  terms,  and  so  he  wished  to  make  it  as  complete 
in  his  own  person  as  possible. 

The  theanthropic  consciousness,  too,  was  attained  under  circum- 
stances unprecedentedly  favourable  to  the  human  race.  Yahveh  had 
become  an  essentially  ethical  being  whose  greatest  love  was  for  holiness, 
and  whose  deepest  hate  was  for  iniquity.  This  marked  a  complete 
accession  of  man  to  liis  Kingdom,  for  virtue  is  the  most  divine  thing  in 
the  world.  Man,  indeed,  cannot  thinly  too  highly  of  this,  his  essential, 
truest  ethical  self.  No  other  deity  than  that  of  the  prophets  could  be 
incarnated  in  human  form  with  more  gain  and  less  loss  of  attributes. 
This  once  attained,  immense  impulsion  of  soul  would  foUow  from  an 
experience  so  new  and  so  near  the  apex  of  the  goal  of  human  develop- 
ment. So  pregnant  a  mystery  would  impel  all  who  could  feel  it  to 
strive  to  utter  it  by  every  crude  trope  available;  to  preserve  as  precious 
and  to  reiterate  as  rubrical;  to  elaborate  into  dogmatic,  mystic,  specu- 
lative form  every  phrase,  im.age,  or  parable  descriptive  of  the  filial 
relationship.  The  sense  of  its  intense  significance  would  give  the 
crassest  of  these  experiences  a  certain  degree  of  sacred  inviolability. 
Thus  it  is  no  longer  possible  to  believe  that  Jesus  brought  the  thean- 
thropic consciousness  ready-made  with  him  into  the  world  or  that  it 
arose  suddenly  and  completely  at  a  particular  stage  like  the  baptism. 
Why  the  synoptists  quietly  assume  but  say  so  little  about  sonship, 
and  why  the  great  Johannin  passages  so  indelibly  stamped  on  the  heart 
of  Christendom  are  so  incondite,  confusing,  and  contradictory,  are 
themselves  facts  that  need  explanation.  It  was  of  course  far  easier 
in  an  age  of  fable  and  miracle  to  substitute  material  for  spiritual  truth 
than  to  describe  supreme  new  stages  of  psychic  development.  The 
Nativity  and  especially  the  Resurrection  were  dramatic  sarcous  scenes 
that  seemed  to  give  tangible  demonstration  of  deity,  and  such  crass 
literalisms  are  of  course  far  more  intelligible.  The  psychic  fact  that 
these  symbols  stood  for  was  so  lofty  and  difficult  of  comprehension 


MESSIANITY,  SONSHIP,  AND  THE  KINGDOM  345 

that  the  terms  of  man's  previous  experience  were  inadequate  to  express 
it,  and  therefore  many  clung  to  the  stupendous  physical  miracle  as  one 
of  the  most  available  vehicles  of  expressing  Jesus'  mediatorial  function. 
Masterpieces  of  ethnic  pedagogic  art  as  they  were  in  their  day,  they  still 
linger  because  their  crudity  of  form  and  matter  is  so  over-compensated 
by  the  sublimity  of  their  content.  Their  very  amorphousness  and 
monstrosity,  if  taken  literally,  constitute  a  standing  incitement  to  trans- 
late them  up  and  back  into  the  spiritual  truth  they  stand  for. 

In  view  of  this,  it  is  not  without  psychological  interest  and  signifi- 
cance to  try  to  indicate  the  very  scattered  and  confused  references  to 
Jesus'  relations  to  his  heavenly  parent.  Gathering  them  all  together 
thus,  and  by  the  simple  method  of  transferring  the  order  of  passages 
bearing  on  the  subject  so  as  to  give  them  a  certain  possible  historic 
sequence,  we  may  arrange  them  to  show  stages  as  follows : 

(i)  First  come  the  texts  that  suggest  great  subordination  to  the 
Father,  akin  to  the  first  stages  of  childhood.  Jesus  is  little,  the  Father 
all;  the  Father  is  greater  than  he;  he  does  nothing  of  himself;  he  speaks 
as  the  Father  taught;  he  is  but  a  voice;  even  his  words  are  not  his, 
but  his  Father's;  he  tells  what  he  has  heard;  he  does  as  the  Father 
commands,  and  can  do  nothing  he  does  not  see  the  Father  do ;  his  doc- 
trine is  not  his;  places  in  heaven  are  not  his  to  give;  he  comes  not  of 
himself,  but  is  sent;  no  man  comes  to  him  except  the  Father  draw  him; 
he  is  astonished  that  his  hearers  should  not  know  that  the  doctrine  is  of 
God,  and  that  he  does  not  speak  merely  by  himself;  he  finds  satisfaction 
that  he  always  does  the  things  that  please  the  Father;  he  has  made 
known  all  the  things  he  heard  from  him;  he  has  declared  and  will  con- 
tinue to  proclaim  his  name.  In  such  expressions  Jesus  seems  to  be 
commissioned  as  a  factor,  agent,  or  envoy,  and  is  far  from  being  pleni- 
potentiary. He  has  little  personal  power  or  discretion,  but  acts  on 
pretty  complete  instructions.  Thus  any  prophet  might  have  spoken 
who  had  seen  the  Lord  as  the  world  had  not.  Such  texts  have  been  the 
arsenal  of  both  the  mystics  and  the  heretics,  who  regard  Jesus  as  dis- 
tinctly inferior  to  the  Father. 

(2)  At  a  somewhat  more  advanced  stage  of  his  sonship  Jesus  is 
given  some  authority,  e.  g.,  to  execute  judgment.  He  is  not  alone, 
but  the  Father  is  with  him,  or  will  give  him  what  is  asked  in  his  name. 
Some  are  given  him  to  keep,  and  he  reports  that  none  save  one  has 
been  lost.     In  his  valedictory  prayer  he  says  that  he  has  finished  the 


346  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

work  assigned  to  him,  and  recommits  those  given  him  to  the  Father. 
He  prays  not  for  the  world,  but  only  for  those  given  him.  Power  has 
been  delegated  him  over  all  flesh  to  confer  eternal  Hfe  upon  those  given 
him.  Here  he  appears  to  have  a  sense  of  delegated  power,  sharply 
defined  and  limited,  although  it  shows  that  the  sense  of  sonship  is 
developing  toward  maturity. 

(3)  To  a  perhaps  next  higher  or  more  closely  related  stage  belong  the 
phrases  in  which  the  relation  of  the  disciples  to  Jesus  is  compared  to 
or  identified  with  his  to  the  Father.  He  loves  them  as  the  Father  loves 
him.  They  are  to  keep  his  commandments  and  abide  in  his  love,  as  he 
keeps  the  Father's  commandments  and  abides  in  his  love.  He  sends 
them  into  the  world  as  he  is  sent.  The  glory  given  him  he  gives  them. 
The  love  of  the  Father  to  him  is  to  be  in  him  and  he  in  them.  Those 
who  confess,  deny,  receive,  hate,  or  persecute  his  disciples,  do  the  same 
to  him,  with  the  frequent  intimation  that  those  who  do  so  to  him  do 
it  to  the  Father  also.  The  Father  is  to  love  them  as  he  loves  him. 
He  is  in  the  Father,  and  they  in  him.  They  that  love  him  shall  be 
beloved  of  the  Father,  and  he  will  love  them.  "As  I  live  by  the 
Father  so  he  that  liveth  in  me,  even  he  shall  live  by  me."  Without  him 
they  can  do  nothing,  etc.  Here  his  mediatorial  function  of  middleman 
between  God  and  his  followers  is  attained  and  expressed.  His  rela- 
tions to  God  are  parallel  to  their  relations  to  him.  Although  in  the 
vine  parables  and  other  allusions  there  are  differences,  the  nascent 
sonship-idea  is  so  far  throughout  entirely  psychic  or  adoptive  with 
nothing  about  it  involving  natural  paternity. 

(4)  Higher,  and  we  may  conceive  later,  comes  a  stage  of  parity, 
consubstantiality,  equipoUence,  if  not  identity  with  the  Father.  All 
things  that  the  Father  hath  are  the  Son's  (Matt.  ii:27)  delivered  to 
him  of  the  Father,  given  into  his  hands.  "All  thine  are  mine,  all 
mine  are  thine,  I  in  thee  and  thou  in  me."  When  Philip  would  be 
shown  the  Father  he  is  asked,  "Have  I  been  so  long  with  you  and  you 
have  not  known  we  ?  "  Those  who  keep  his  word  the  Father  will  love 
and  "ife  will  come  and  abide  with  him."  Both  will  love  those  who 
love  the  Son.  To  know  him  is  to  know  the  Father.  "All  things  that 
the  Father  hath  are  his,"  and,  as  if  their  functions  were  now  reversed, 
"he  shall  take  of  mine  and  show  it  to  you."  Now  he  readily  assigns 
to  the  disciples  the  places  in  heaven  which  he  had  before  said  in  answer 
to  the  same  request  were  not  his  to  give  (Matt,  xix:28).    Not  only 


MESSIANITY,  SONSHIP,  AND  THE  KINGDOM  347 

does  no  man  know  who  the  Son  is  but  the  Father,  and  who  the  Father 
is  but  the  Son,  but  the  Son  knows  the  Father  even  as  the  Father  knows 
the  Son.  The  Father  is  in  him  and  he  is  in  the  Father.  Before  he  had 
said  that  all  that  was  asked  in  his  name  the  Father  would  give,  but  now 
he  says,  "If  you  ask  anything  in  my  name  /  will  do  it."  "Whoever 
loves  me  shaU  be  loved  by  the  Father  and"  (as  if  a  climax)  "I  will 
love  him."  "Also  these  things  they  will  do  because  they  know  not 
the  Father  nor  me."  Now  to  hate,  love,  receive,  see,  know  the  Father 
and  the  Son  are  one  and  the  same  act  and  state.  In  all  this  there  is  no 
trace  of  subordination,  but,  indeed,  a  few  phrases  in  which  the  Son 
almost  seems  to  take  precedence. 

(5)  An  impUcation,  and  perhaps  also  a  last  stage,  is  that  of  the 
transcendence  of  his  own  nature.  These  expressions  seem  prompted 
when  the  shadow  of  the  cross  first  appears.  He  is  to  go  hence  and  the 
disciples  cannot  tell  whither.  Soon  they  will  see  him  no  more.  None 
asks  him,  "  Whither  goest  thou?  "  Later,  perhaps,  he  announces  again 
and  again  that  he  goes  to  the  Father.  This  should  cause  them  to 
rejoice  if  they  love  him.  Sometimes  he  promises  to  come  again. 
Again,  he  goes  to  prepare  them  a  place  and  will  receive  them  unto 
himself  but  they  cannot  follow  him  now.  When  he  next  drinks  the 
fruit  of  the  vine  it  will  be  in  the  Father's  kingdom.  Thence  he  will 
send  them  the  Comforter  from  the  Father  who  will  testify  of  him. 
Because  he  goes  to  the  Father  the  world  will  be  convinced  of  righteous- 
ness and,  a  causal  sequence  of  the  same  event,  the  disciples  shall  do 
greater  works  than  he.  Even  the  dead  shall  hear  his  voice.  As  to  his 
origin,  the  disciples  are  from  beneath;  he  is  from  above.  Then,  at 
their  entreaty,  speaking  more  plainly  than  before  he  announces  that 
he  has  proceeded  forth  from  God.  He  loves  them  because  they  be- 
lieve that  he  came  out  from  God.  He  is  to  receive  the  glory  that  he 
had  before  the  foundation  of  the  world.  He  came  forth  from  the 
Father  into  the  world,  and  returns  to  God;  he  is  himself  the  bread  that 
came  down  from  heaven.  Here  and  in  the  preceding  phase  lie  germs 
of  the  supernal  birth,  the  Resurrection,  and  the  Ascension,  which  seek 
to  body  forth  in  tangible  form  these  exalted  states  of  mind  which 
historically  not  only  preceded,  but  gave  the  initial  psychic  motivation 
to  the  parousia  and  all  the  post-mortem  records,  as  well  as  later  to  even 
the  Nativity. 

Of  course  these  stages  must  not  be  regarded  as  too  sharply  de- 


348  JESUS   IN   THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

marcated  in  time.  They  are  rather  degrees  of  nascency,  the  last  more 
or  less  implicit  in  the  first.  Jesus'  theanthropic  consciousness,  Gottes- 
hewusstsein,  lived,  as  it  were,  on  a  slope;  and  mood,  recognition  by 
others,  favouring  or  adverse  currents  of  outer  events  or  inner  states, 
impelled  his  soul  now  up,  now  down,  this  scale.  At  the  CrucifLxion 
the  ebb  of  conviction  sank  to  zero,  as  he  felt  forsaken  of  God  as  he  was 
discredited  and  deserted  by  his  friends.  On  the  other  hand,  hostile 
critics  have  raised  the  question  whether,  had  he  Uved  to  a  good  old  age 
and  achieved  vast  other  successes,  this  sense  of  oneness  with  God 
might  have  grown  to  a  dogmatic  oracuHsm  or  megalomania.  To 
such  vain  speculations  it  can  only  be  answered  that  his  faith  seems  to 
have  had  just  the  degree  of  intensity  and  elevation  to  give  it  maximal 
psychological  efficiency  as  the  punctum  saliens  of  the  new  and  epochal 
historical  movement  which  it  inaugurated.  The  very  phrase.  Son  of 
God,  is  an  artistic,  anthropomorphic  masterpiece,  because  it  expresses 
correctly  and  in  terms  of  the  closest  personal  relation  the  best  attitude 
of  man  toward  God,  and  indeed  by  no  means  loses  its  appositeness 
even  if  the  Father  be  conceived  as  impersonal.  It  means  that  the 
claimant  of  this  title  feels  himself  a  child  of  the  universe  out  of  which 
he  sprang,  and  has  a  filial  attitude  toward  it.  To  attain  and  maintain 
this  attitude  it  is  not  necessary  to  regard  the  cosmos  animistically. 
What  lies  behind  this,  perhaps  the  most  pregnant  phrase  in  all  the 
culture  history  of  mankind? 

Evolutionism  did  not  begin  with  Darwin,  but  with  the  very  early 
cosmogonies.  Man  has  always  been  interested,  not  only  in  his  human 
but  in  his  cosmic  pedigree.  He  has  yearned  to  know  in  the  language  of 
one  of  the  oldest  Vedic  hymns,  "Whence,  oh  whence  did  this  great 
creation  spring?"  Was  it  made  or  did  it  grow?  In  any  case  what 
was  first  or  in  the  beginning,  and  how  is  man  related  to  this?  All 
ontologies  from  Parmenides  to  Hegel  have  grappled  with  the  problem 
of  man's  ultimate  derivation.  Spinoza  was  "God-intoxicated," 
although  his  God  was  substance,  knowable  in  only  two  of  his  perhaps 
numberless  attributes.  Mystics  of  all  kinds,  from  Proclus  and  Plo- 
tinus  to  Boehme  and  Eckhart,  have  striven  to  come  into  contact  with 
or  immersed  themselves  in  pure  predicateless  being.  What  was  in  the 
beginning  has  always  been  one  of  the  most  haunting  of  all  questions 
that  the  world  has  addressed  to  thinking  man,  and  it  has  had  as  many 
answers  as  there  are  mythic  cycles,  creeds,  or  systems.     It  has  been 


MESSIANITY,  SONSHIP,  AND  THE  KINGDOM  349 

conceived  as  undifferentiated  being,  so  highly  generahzed  that  no  posi- 
tive affirmation  can  be  made  without  Hmiting  it,  so  that  it  is  Httle  else 
but  the  substantive  verb  standing  alone,  without  either  subject  or 
predicate,  and  tantamount  to  nothing.  It  is  existence  without  quality. 
In  this  old  ontological  mould  have  been  cast  such  conceptions  as  cosmic 
gas,  the  undifferentiated  and  unknowable.  Or  more  anthropomor- 
phically  it  has  been  called  nous,  logos,  a  reason,  force,  or  energy  con- 
ceived as  will,  with  a  developmental  nisus  behind  it,  or  love  has  been 
the  spring  of  all  things.  This  great  recessionary  Hang  or  trend  has  of 
late  been  studied  in  two  new  fields,  which  show  how  its  primordial  and 
instinctive  nature  antedates  the  dawn  of  reason. 

(i)  The  first  is  its  prevalence  among  children,^  who  often  lose 
themselves  in  cosmic  emotion  in  the  contemplation  of  infinities  of  time 
and  space.  This  may  become  a  dizzying  obsession  or  neurosis.  The 
soul  is  drawn  heavenward  in  sky-  and  star-gazing,  and  may  become 
almost  agoraphobiac  toward  the  blue  vault  above.  The  psychogenet- 
icist  sees  in  this  phenomenon  the  germs  of  such  cults  as  those  of 
Varuna  or  Urania  or  Nirvana,  and  perhaps  of  the  Yogi  discipline.  It 
is  the  pantheistic  "impulse  to  return,"  the  first  effort  to  think  sub 
specie  eternitatis.  It  is  the  first  naive  orientation  toward  the  beginning 
and  end  of  all  things,  a  dim  instinctive  sense  of  a  menstruum  into 
which  even  personality  will  be  resolved. 

(2)  Students  of  the  mind  of  primitive  races  have  within  the  last 
two  decades  found,  especially  in  all  our  Indian  tribes,  who  are  best 
known,  and  among  other  primitive  people,  especially  the  Melanesians, 
cumulative  traces  of  a  stage  of  culture  that  preceded  the  animism 
which  Tylor  thought  primitive.  Although  concerning  these  primitive 
conceptions  scholars  are  by  no  means  accordant,  there  is  an  ao^reement 
that  we  have  here  the  undiscovered  but  very  general  stage  through 
which  the  souls  of  perhaps  all  savages  pass.  On  this  view  all  men 
very  early  in  the  history  of  mankind  had  a  deep,  overmastering  sense 
of  some  all-pervading  power,  variously  called  Mana,  Orenda,  Wakanda, 
etc.,  which  is  not  the  great  spirit  and  which  has  probably  no  trace  of 
personality  in  it.  This  power  was  before  and  back  of  all  things,  per- 
vades them,  and  gives  unity  to  the  most  diverse  things  in  nature,  for 
it  is  continuous  and  so  cannot  be  broken.  It  brings  all  things  to  pass. 
It  is  an  ancient,  sacred,  mysterious  energy,  that  is  supersensual  and 

'See  my  "Adolescence,"  Vol.  2,  p.  159  et  seq. 


350  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

metaphysical.  It  is  a  subtle  bond  that  gives  all  things  a  common  life 
and  makes  them  akin.  It  is  also  a  bond  of  souls.  Mana  is  felt  chiefly 
in  times  of  great  social  excitement  and  group  activities  which  bring 
individuals  into  the  closest  touch  with  one  another,  as  if  the  individual 
soul  expanded  into  that  of  the  entire  tribe,  and  this  expansion  is  pro- 
longed until  it  feels  itself  to  be  continuous  with  the  principle  of  life, 
and  even  with  that  of  being  itself.  Some  think  Mana  the  source 
of  magic  power.  Lovejoy  thinks  it  is  the  first  philosophy.  Harri- 
son^ finds  it  pervading  the  religion  of  ancient  Greece  before  Zeus,  and 
compares  it  to  Bergson's  duree  reelle.  Durkheim^  seems  to  conceive 
it  as  a  kind  of  totem  of  the  universe,  and  so  does  Marett.'  It  is  a  sense 
of  oneness  that  seems  to  enter  from  without,  and  most  agree  that  it  is 
superpersonal.*  Hocking^  thinks  it  an  ontological  reminder  of  man's 
sense  of  dependence.  It  is  only  experienced  in  states  of  excitement 
and  social  solidarity.  It  has  been  defined  as  a  sense  of  exceedingness 
or  excessivity,  or  a  kind  of  ecstasy,  involving  some  surrender  of  the 
normal  self.  It  brings  with  it  a  feeling  of  a  larger,  higher  life,  of  ela- 
tion and  freedom  as  against  personal  limitation.  A  greater  perfection 
is  felt,  etc.  At  first  students  of  Mana  thought  that  the  conception 
of  it  was  quite  distinct  both  from  the  ontology  of  philosophy  and  from 
the  haunting  infinity  psychosis  of  children,  and  yet  deeper  study  shows 
the  very  close  psychic  analogies  and  equivalences  of  all  three. 

Moreover,  every  noetic  quest,  such  as  that  for  categories  or  innate 
ideas  or  forces,  is  motivated  by  the  same  propensity  of  the  soul  to  get 
back  to  an  abstract  background  of  the  universe.  It  was  this  deep 
trend  in  the  human  soul  that  made  man  so  prone  to  accept  modern 
evolutionism  perhaps  prematurely,  and  to  presuppose  its  operation  at 
points  of  the  upward  scale  where  it  is  as  yet  by  no  means  established. 
In  all  these  ways  man  has  sought  to  strengthen  the  feeling  of  his  own 
legitimacy  as  a  true  son  of  the  cosmos,  and  this  title  makes  him  feel 
more  at  home  in  it.  He  yearns  back  toward  the  roots  of  things  in 
order  to  feel  that  he  is  the  heir  of  all  the  ages.  His  will  loves  to  posit 
itself  as  a  direct  derivative  of  creative  energy.  He  loves  to  think  his 
sense  of  duty  a  categorical  imperative,  and  also  and  especially  that  the 


'Jane  E.  Harrison:  "The  Religion  of  Ancient  Greece."    London,  1906,  66  p. 

«Emile  Durkheim;  "Les  Formes  E16mentaires  de  la  Vie  Religieuse,  le  Systime  Tot£mique  en  Australie."    Paris, 
Alcan,  igiJ,  647  p.    See  also  L' Annie  Sociologique. 

•R.  R.  Marett:  "The  Threshold  of  Religion."    London,  Methuen,  1909,  173  p. 

^Lucien  L6vy-Bruhl:  "Les  fonctions  mentales  dans  socifitfs  infirieures."    Paris,  Alcan,  1910,  461  p. 

'W.  E.  Hocking:  "The  Meaning  of  God  in  Human  Experience."    New  Haven,  Yale  Univ.  Press,  191a,  586  p. 


MESSIANITY,  SONSHIP,  AND  THE  KINGDOM  351 

absolute  lives  and  moves  in  his  own  heart  and  that  his  feeHngs,  whether 
of  dependence  in  Schleiermacher's  sense,  or  of  absolute  freedom,  as 
Hegel  prefers,  incorporate  his  intellect  and  his  heart  into  the  ultimate 
scheme  of  things.  In  all  these  ways  the  soul  strives  to  feel  itself  one 
with  the  inmost  nature  of  the  world,  and  to  realize  that  to  be  either  the 
abject  slave  or  the  Supreme  Lord  of  the  universe  are  only  ambivalent 
expressions  of  the  same  instinct  of  unity  and  solidarity  with  self,  others, 
or  the  world. 

Thus  to  personate  all  the  sources  of  nature  and  mind,  and  to  salute 
them  all  in  one  as  "  Our  Father  in  heaven,"  as  both  the  goal  and  end  of 
all  things,  was  a  sublime  achievement  of  pedagogic,  pragmatic,  human- 
istic genius.  Each  is  the  child  of  nature  and  of  man,  and  therefore  of 
God.  Pure  reason  may  soar  to  the  absolute,  but  practical  reason 
regards  even  being  itself  animistically,  as  parental,  just  as  theology 
ascribes  ontology  as  an  attribute  to  God  not  inconsistent  with  his 
fatherhood.  Our  love  to  it  seems  reflected  in  its  love  of  us.  Man 
seems  called  to  do  its  will  because  he  made  it  according  to  his  own. 
To  know  it  is  the  highest  self-knowledge,  and  therefore  man  anthropo- 
morphizes the  collective  fundaments  of  things  into  a  unity  that  seems 
personal,  and  in  this  world  he  is  more  at  home  as  in  a  father's  house 
made  for  him. 

Thus,  by  identifying  himself  with  God,  Jesus  went  beyond  Messi- 
anity  by  just  so  far  as  the  God  of  the  prophets  transcended  the  Hebrew 
Messiah,  and  he  also  took  another  step  toward  death  because  deity 
as  mankind  in  its  totality  is  greater  than  any  single  individual  can  ever 
become.  God  was  in  him  to  an  exceptional  degree,  but  God  cannot 
come  to  adequate  and  complete  consciousness  in  any  indi\ddual;  and 
so,  since  God  could  not  come  to  Jesus  in  all  the  plenitude  of  his  attri- 
butes, Jesus  had  to  go  to  God.  In  plainer  and  more  modern  terms, 
this  means  that  if  Jesus'  realization  had  been  complete  that  God  was 
simply  and  only  ideal  humanity  rather  than  a  transcendent  celestial 
person,  and  that  man's  universe  were  all  of  his  own  making,  and  if 
this  conviction  had  also  pervaded  the  minds  of  his  followers,  he  need 
not  have  died,  risen,  and  ascended,  to  document  his  sonship.  These 
latter  were  a  dramatization,  necessary  because  of  man's  inability  to 
accept  Jesus'  thesis  of  sonship  unless  his  soul  was  thought  to  actually 
go  up  to  the  traditional  abode  of  God.  The  fact  which  they  symboUze 
is  that  he  found,  went  to,  and  became  the  divine  in  his  own  soul. 


352  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

He  had  to  die,  because  men  in  the  blindness  of  their  hearts  and  minds 
could  not  believe  that  he  had  really  found  or  become  God  unless  he 
was  thought  to  have  divested  himself  of  his  body  and  gone  up  through 
space  in  ghostly  and  levitated  form.  Thus  Jesus  had  to  literally  die 
and  ascend  to  give  a  modulus  or  allegory  of  a  successful  quest  for  God. 
This  was  clung  to  as  sacred  because  of  the  meaning  it  was  dimly  felt 
to  embody. 

Connmiitted  as  Jesus  was  to  the  objective,  hypostatized  interpreta- 
tion of  God,  and  creative  as  was  his  designation  of  this  concept  as 
Father,  many  of  the  above  Johannin  passages  show  that  he  also  revered 
the  God  within  his  own  breast  as  a  kind  of  collective  term  for  the  racial 
instincts,  most  of  which  slumber  umevealed  in  us  all,  throughout  our 
entire  lives.  Hence  we  find  a  strange  duality  of  interpretation  in  his 
mind.  The  Holy  Spirit  that  was  set  free  by  his  death  and  was  in  fact 
his  soul,  goes  up  to  God  in  heaven,  but  it  is  also  commissioned  to  dwell 
on  earth  in  the  souls  of  Jesus'  followers,  where  it  really  belongs,  al- 
though he  bequeathed  it  to  both  them  and  God.  Thus  Jesus  long 
hoped  that  his  friends  would  understand  the  inwardness  of  his  God- 
quest,  and  perhaps  the  beloved  disciple  was  well  on  the  way  to  do  so. 
Therefore  Jesus  was  reticent  about  it  all,  and  shrank  from  promulga- 
tion, because  he  saw  that  crassly  minded  as  most  of  the  disciples  were 
he  could  not  make  them  realize  that  he  had  found  God  within,  and  that 
there  was  really  no  other  way  of  doing  so.  To  them  the  only  success- 
ful quest  of  God  would  be  to  go  to  him  above  as  one  can  do  only  after 
death.  This  he  had  to  do,  therefore,  as  a  last  resort,  because  worst 
came  to  worst,  since  the  only  God  they  knew  was  to  be  found  at  home 
only  in  the  sky.  Perhaps  had  there  been  time  for  a  longer  apprentice- 
ship on  the  part  of  liis  followers,  they  might  have  understood  without 
the  tragic  object-lesson  which  Jesus  chose  to  give  them  at  last,  rather 
than  that  they  should  hopelessly  fail  to  understand  his  divinity.  Thus 
he  gave  an  objective  idolization  of  it  which  the  Church  has  cherished 
as  so  central.  But  for  this  only  mystic  consciousness  of  the  deep  inner 
things  of  the  soul,  of  which  the  death  and  Resurrection  are  only  sym- 
bols, would  his  successors  ever  have  confessed  his  divinity? 

If  the  great  sayings  of  Jesus  in  the  Fourth  Gospel  as  to  his  rela- 
tions to  the  Father  have  any  coherent  and  intelligible  meaning,  it 
is  that  the  way  to  God  is  that  which  opens  within  the  depths  of  the 
human  soul.     The  true  son  of  God  reaches,  communes,  and  unites 


MESSIANITY,  SONSHIP,  AND  THE  KINGDOM  353 

with  him  by  mystic  inner  experience.  Of  this  the  laying  aside  of  the 
body  and  the  rising  through  space  to  a  place  are  only  symbols,  even  if 
the  best  and  only  ones.  The  star  of  the  wise  men,  the  opening  heavens 
at  the  baptism,  the  reversal  of  gravity  at  the  Ascension,  the  cloud  that 
"received  him  out  of  their  sight,"  suggesting  absorption  or  melting  into 
the  empyrean,  and  all  other  astral  references,  as  Voigt's  careful  study, 
"Die  Geschichte  Jesu  und  die  Astrologie"  (1911,  225P.),  suggested,  are 
all  to  be  taken  tropically.  God  is  not  reached  by  a  voice  through 
space  at  any  definite  place,  nor  can  we  conceive  Jesus  returning  to  him 
by  the  same  way  by  which  he  came  down  to  earth  to  be  born.  This  is 
all  myth  and  symbol,  although  in  the  highest  Platonic  sense  of  these 
words,  and  hallowed  as  is  all  this  imagery  of  the  highest  of  all  psychic 
processes.  To  rise  to  God  is  to  enter  the  soul  of  the  human  race  as  a 
beneficent,  discarnate,  disembodied,  superpersonal,  diffusive  power. 
This  was  the  true  assumption;  for  Uranotropism  is  really  spiritual 
involution,  and  conmiunion  with  God  is  the  acme  of  communion  with 
the  larger  racial  soul  within  us.  The  absorption  of  Jesus'  risen  spirit 
into  the  cloud  did  not  mean  that  he  had  left  the  world  and  man,  but 
that  he  had  completely  entered  them.  It  marked  the  consummation 
of  his  will  to  die  in  order  to  attain  a  more  than  personal  immortality 
in  the  human  race.^  In  the  apocryphal  Gospel  of  Peter  (Chapter  5), 
Jesus  is  made  to  ascend  directly  from  the  cross,  while  in  Chapter  9 
the  resurrected  Jesus  is  of  supernatural  stature.  If  Jesus  died  as  Mes- 
siah, his  Resurrection  and  Ascension  show  him  forth  as  Son  of  God. 
Here  the  two  functions  are  perhaps  most  dift'erentiated.  If  the  former 
was  historic,  the  latter  is  more  Docetic,  spiritual,  plastic,  poetic.  Mere 
personality  had  ended,  and  with  the  Resurrection  the  soul  of  Jesus 
became  henceforth  incarnated  in  the  community  he  founded. 

The  Jesus  that  arose  and  ascended  was  not  a  reanimated  cadaver; 
so  that  the  emptiness  or  tenancy  of  the  tomb,  so  much  discussed  of 
late,  is  irrelevant.  His  body  mouldered  like  ours.  The  post-mortem 
Jesus  had  no  vestige  of  historicity,  but  was  the  most  consummate  of  all 
the  creations  of  humanity's  wishes,  hopes,  and  aspirations,  the  embodi- 
ment of  his  ad  astra  per  aspera  impulsions,  the  symbol  of  what  we  trust 
our  future  history  is  to  be  on  to  the  end  of  time.  Belief  in  it  is  the 
artistic  interpretation  of  the  yet-unspent  momentum  of  human  evolu- 

>See  my  "Thanatophobia  and  Immortality,"  Am.  Jour.  Psychol.,  Oct.,  igis,  p.  581  el  seq.  Also  Lake:  "The 
Historical  Evidence  for  the  Resurrection  of  Jesus  Christ."  1907,  Chapter  7.  Also  N.  Gill:  "On  the  Intermediate 
State,"  Chapter  7. 


354  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

tion,  which  in  that  day  had  to  be  conceived  as  apotheosis  and  divini- 
tization;  for  man  will  become  divine  when  he  reaHzes  not  merely  theo- 
retically but  in  all  his  life  the  sense  in  which  the  Son  of  God  is  the  son  of 
man  and  will  return  to  his  father,  man.  Thus  Jesus  not  only  brought 
the  twilight  of  the  Yahveh  of  the  prophets  in  reducing  him  to  human 
dimensions,  but  made  the  beginning  of  those  long  processes  the  goal 
of  which  is  the  resumption  of  transcendent  deity  into  immanent  hu- 
manity. Thus  the  son  of  man  will  become  father  of  the  true  God,  and 
all  things  be  given  into  his  hands.  This  is  now  being  accomplished  in 
the  Kingdom  of  the  Son. 

III.  The  Kingdom .  And  now  how  shall  we  conceive  the  Kingdom, 
the  third  great  achievement  of  Jesus?  Roughly  we  may  say  that  it 
v/as  a  community  in  which  his  own  Holy  Spirit  was  reincarnated  after 
his  death,  his  heir,  to  which  he  bequeathed  his  soul.  In  it  he  began 
again  a  new  (this  time  pluripersonal)  life  on  earth.  It  was  first  the 
imdsible  and  then  became  the  visible  Church.  As  the  child  is  more 
generic  and  a  better  representative  of  the  race  than  the  adult,  and  so 
nearer  God  (as  Jesus  saw  and  said  long  before  Wordsworth),  so  his  own 
imique  God-consciousness  which  was  a  growing,  all-pervading  sense  of 
the  genetic  soul  within  him,  came  more  and  more  to  subtend  the  differ- 
ences which  separate  individuals  and  to  be  not  only  genetic  but  generic. 
His  divinity  consisted  in  his  ideal  and  eternal  childhood,  or  in  doing 
away  with  the  threshold  which  separates  the  individual  from  the  species 
in  us.  The  child  is  father  of  the  man  he  is  to  be,  first  because  his  traits 
are  phyletically  older  than  adulthood,  which  is  a  later  addition  or 
superstructure,  and  secondly,  because  he  is  a  more  generalized  type 
from  which  the  adult  departs  by  the  specialization  and  limitation 
involved  in  growth.  More  than  the  adult  he  is  "human,  and  nothing 
human  is  foreign  to  him."  Psychoanalysts  never  tire  of  insisting 
that  the  childlike  is  the  unconscious,  and  vice  versa  {das  Kindliche  ist 
das  Unbewusste  und  das  Unhewusste  ist  das  Kindliche).  Thus  Jesus 
is  the  eternally  childlike  {das  ewige  Kindliche)  in  us.  In  this  consists 
his  filial  nature.  He  is  God's  own  Son,  for  deity  is  intrinsic  man's 
autistic  nature.  Jesus'  personality  differed  from  that  of  others  by  its 
plenitude  of  racial  traits  and  in  his  ready  access  to  this  source  of  power. 
The  ego  must  be  minimized  because  over-individuation  alienates  from 
this  divine  well-spring  of  power.  Jesus  was  not  a  philosopher  of  the 
subconscious,  but  its  pragmatist,  who  first  taught  the  use  of  and  right 


MESSIANITY,  SONSHIP,  AND  THE  KINGDOM  355 

attitude  to  it.  This  made  him  a  man  of  destiny,  and  gave  unique 
momentum  to  his  deeds  and  words.  The  high  degree  of  affectivity 
often  developed  where  injective  and  ejective  tendencies  of  thought 
oscillate,  as  in  the  Johannin  mysticism,  is  highly  characteristic  of  the 
vita  religiosa  in  which  subject  and  object  often  become  indistinguishable. 
It  is  hard  to  find  an  Aristotehan  mean  between  medium  Sludge  and 
Nirvana  or  between  oraculism  and  Vedanta. 

This  mean  Jesus  thought  and  found,  not  in  any  single  personaHty, 
even  in  his  own,  but  in  a  select  group  of  persons  which  after  his  death 
grew  in  numbers  and  reached  an  unprecedented  closeness  of  union  one 
with  another,  surpassing  even  the  friendship  so  lauded  in  classical 
antiquity,  for  the  ties  that  bound  his  followers  were  closer  even  than 
any  ties  of  family  or  blood.  Each  member  sought,  willed,  loved,  feared 
nothing  for  himself,  but  all  things  for  the  brethren.  They  were  in 
Jesus.  They  were  his  body,  and  he  was  their  soul.  Community  of 
goods  was  only  one  and  not  the  chief  expression  of  this  new  unison  of 
soul.  With  such  new  ardour  of  fellowship  it  would  be  strange  indeed 
if  there  were  not  occasionally  agapistic  perversions  between  the  mem- 
bers one  of  another,  and  also  of  Christ.  It  is  no  wonder  that  the  dis- 
ciples Hngered  together  and  were  loath  to  separate  after  the  effusion 
of  the  Spirit.  Kalthoff  and  his  pupils  think^  that  the  figure  of  Jesus 
himself  was  created  out  of  the  heat  and  light  of  the  new  brotherly  love. 
They  deem  primitive  Christianity  a  gradual  synthesis  of  Messianism, 
Stoicism,  and  various  proletarian  societies,  and  think  that  Jesus  is  only 
the  personification  of  the  ideas  and  experiences  of  the  earhest  groups  of 
believers.  His  suffering  and  Resurrection  are  the  martyrdom  and 
revival  of  the  early  Church,  and  he  never  really  lived.  He  was  a  fictive 
patron  and  founder  of  the  Christian  as  some  think  ^sculapius  was  of 
the  medical  guilds.  Every  great  movement  of  the  folk-soul,  according 
to  Kalthoff,  demands  a  personal  ideal;  and  even  if  Jesus  was  an  optical 
illusion,  he  was  a  necessary  presupposition  of  the  growing  Church. 
Jesus  embodied  the  psychic  content  of  a  movement  that  had  to  evolve 
a  leader,  and  his  figure,  projected  backward  by  the  Evangelists,  repre- 
sents the  aspirations  and  ideals  of  the  infant  community  incarnated 
in  its  flesh.    Each  item  in  his  Hfe  and  teachings  is  meant  to  mirror 


»A.  Kalthoff:  "Das  Christusproblem;  Grundlinien  zu  e.  Sozialtheologie,"  igoa.  "Die  Entstehung  des  Christentums," 
1904.  "Was  wissen  wir  von  Jesus?"  replying  to  Bousset,  1904.  See  also  M.  Maurenbrecher:  "Von  Nazareth  nach 
Golgotha,"  ipoQ.  Lublinski:  "Die  Entstehung  des  Christentums  aus  der  antiken  Kultur,"  1910.  Also  "Falsche 
Beweise  fUr  die  Existenz  des  Menschen  Jesus,"  loio.    W.  Schultz:  "Dokumente  der  Gnosis,  "1910. 


3S6  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

some  event  in  the  nascent  stages  of  the  development  of  the  Church, 
as  similarly,  post-exilic  Judaism  put  back  later  ordinances  as  com- 
mandments given  to  Moses.  Thus  the  commitment  of  the  keys  to 
Peter  was  put  back  from  the  later  emergency  in  which  it  arose.  We 
seem  to  get  very  close  to  a  real  individual  heart  in  the  Gospels,  and  this 
shows  that  it  was  a  product  of  genuine  literary  ability  natural  enough 
after  once  the  personal  traits  began  to  be  given  to  the  Christ-image. 
The  freedom,  idealism,  and  intense  new  enthusiasm  of  a  group  very 
sympathetically  fused  into  a  community  could  give  an  illusion  of 
reahty  more  compelhng  than  history  itself.^  When  we  consider  the 
psychological  principle  that  fervid  assent  to  a  traditio  recepta  is  only  a 
lesser  degree  of  the  will  to  believe,  which,  if  intensified,  could  create 
the  tradition,  we  must  construe  Kalthoff 's  theory  as  illustrating  only  an 
exaggerated  appreciation  of  the  vitality  of  the  new  group-consciousness 
in  which  that  of  Jesus  became  incorporated  and  which  took  up  and 
carried  on  his  work  of  organizing  the  Kingdom  on  earth. 

Besides  being  the  perpetual  repository  of  Jesus'  soul  two  other 
facts  were  implicit  in  this,  which  made  for  the  very  liighest  ideality  in 
the  new  community.  The  first  was  the  immeasurable  reinforcement 
of  the  behef  in  immortahty,  and  the  second  was  the  conviction  of  a 
speedy  end  of  all  things.  Both  of  these  made  for  spirituaUty  and  in- 
wardness. To  live  in  daily  expectation  of  judgment  often  made  for 
purity,  while  the  all-dominance  of  the  next  world  over  tliis  and  of  the 
soul  over  the  body  exalted  each  above  all  material  aims  and  all  proxi- 
mate ends  and  methods.  The  righteousness  of  the  new  Kingdom  must 
be  diffused  to  the  farthest  extent  and  in  the  least  time,  for  the  only 
real  business  of  every  one  was  to  save  his  soul  and  that  of  others.  In 
danger  the  herding  instincts  of  all  gregarious  creatures  culminate;  and 
so  the  cofraternization  of  individuals  who  stood  in  unprecedentedly 
close  relations  to  one  another  gave  a  unique  solidarity  not  only  between 
the  individuals  but  between  the  different  groups,  however  widely 
separated  in  race  or  rank.  Solidarity  of  all  the  persons  and  all  the 
groups  one  with  another  meant  the  unity  of  Christ's  body  in  which 
liis  soul  went  marching  on.  They  ate  his  body  and  drank  his  blood 
commensally  as  a  symbol  of  oneness  both  with  him  and  with  one 
another. 

Thus  with  the  conviction,  first,  that  he  was  indeed  the  Jev.ish 

'J.  Weiss:  "yi'su";  von  Xaiiireth,  Mylhus  oucr  Gcschichtc."     1910,  171  p. 


MESSIANITY,  SONSHIP,  AND  THE  KINGDOM  357 

IMessiah  called  to  both  reinterpret  and  realize  that  ideal,  and  second, 
that  he  was  the  son  of  Yahveh,  in  a  very  unique  sense  was  also  involved 
the  third  supreme  affirmation,  viz.,  of  the  Kingdom  of  God  or  of  heaven. 
This  was  a  community  in  which  the  new  and  higher  life  which  he  illus- 
trated and  taught  was  to  be  lived  out.  It  appears,  as  we  have  seen, 
that  the  attainment  of  the  Messianic  consciousness  dawned  very  early 
in  Jesus'  public  career,  and  appears  as  a  fixed  assumption  later;  also 
that  the  sense  of  sonship  which  was  involved  in  and  yet  distinct  from 
it  arose  not  long  after,  and  was  well  established.  Both  these  in  some 
sense  involved  the  Kingdom;  but  only  after  the  shadow  of  death  had 
fallen  across  Jesus'  path  did  the  details  of  it  chiefly  occupy  his  con- 
sciousness, so  that  only  toward  the  last  of  his  career  were  his  concep- 
tions of  the  Kingdom  in  a  state  of  rapid  evolution. 

If  we  turn  for  a  moment  from  Jesus'  personal  life  and  character, 
with  the  study  of  which  the  new  Christology  began,  and  consider  him 
as  a  teacher,  following  in  so  doing  the  impulsion  that  prompted  his  dis- 
ciples first  of  all  to  coUect  the  logia,  sayings,  or  words,  which  he  had 
declared  would  survive  heaven  and  earth  and  make  each  who  kept  them 
a  rock,  our  first  problem  is  to  ask  what  was  the  central  theme  of  his 
teaching;  that  is,  hov/  can  it  be  most  comprehensively  characterized? 
In  past  decades  we  have  had  many  opinions  upon  this  subject.  Fair- 
bairn  thought  the  divine  fatherhood  his  focal  concern;  Titius  con- 
ceived blessedness  to  be  the  root  of  it  all;  Julius  Miiller  said  it  was  sin; 
Rothe  called  it  righteousness;  Dorner  held  that  the  chief  stress  was 
laid  on  justification.  But  I  think  all  those  who  carefully  scrutinize 
the  utterances  at  first  hand  must  incline  to  the  view,  of  late  so  strongly 
advocated  by  men  of  such  diverse  standards  as  Ritschl,  Wendt,  Lutgert 
and  many  others,  that  the  most  comprehensive  characterization  of  his 
teaching  is  that  it  proclaims  a  new  Kingdom  of  God  or  heaven  or  a  new 
social  state  which  is  referred  to  in  no  less  than  106  Gospel  passages, 
only  two  of  which  are  peculiar  to  John.^ 

Dissatisfied  and  confused  by  the  voluminous  recent  literature  on 


iConfining  ourselves  first  to  the  more  explicit  statements  of  Matthew  in  order  concerning  the  Kingdom,  we  are  told 
that  the  poor  in  spirit,  also  tliose  persecuted  for  righteousness'  sake,  will  possess  it.  Those  who  break  the  command- 
ments are  least,  and  those  who  do  them  greatest,  in  it.  If  our  righteousness  does  not  exceed  that  of  the  scribes  we  shall 
not  enter.  We  must  pray  that  it  come,  must  seek  it  first,  and  al!  else  will  be  added.  Not  all  that  call  on  the  Lord  can 
enter.  It  must  be  proclaimed.  Some  would  now  take  it  by  violence.  It  is  given  to  the  disciples  to  know  it.  It  is 
like  a  man  sowing  good  seed,  not  tares.  It  is  like  a  grain  of  mustard  seed,  like  leaven,  a  hidden  treasure,  a  precious 
pearl,  a  net.  Some  will  not  die  until  they  see  the  Son  coming  in  it.  Those  like  children  are  greatest  in  it,  and  of  such  is 
the  Kingdom.     The  rich  cannot  enter.     It  will  be  taken  from  the  Jews.     The  scribes  shut  it  up.     Its  GosF>el  must  be 

E reached.    The  disciples  must  drink  in  it  with  the  Father.    The  angels  will  sort  out  of  it  those  that  offend.     We  should 
e  instructed  in  it.    The  parables  of  the  unjust  steward,  the  eleventh  hour  workman,  the  king's  marriage,  the  tea  virgins, 
tbe  one,  five,  and  ten  talents,  are  all  called  parables  of  the  Kingdom,  etc. 


358  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

the  subject  of  Jesus'  social  teachings,  I  made  a  tabular  Hst  of  all  the 
passages  with  their  contexts  in  the  first  three  Gospels,  where  the 
Kingdom  is  specifically  mentioned,  in  order  to  see  if  any  general  char- 
terization  of  them  was  possible.  Assuming  these  to  be  the  prime  data, 
to  them  I  later  added  another  larger  tabular  list  of  passages  generally 
believed  to  refer  to  the  Kingdom  but  not  mentioning  it  by  name.  From 
a  careful  scrutiny  of  these  data  the  most  obvious  fact  about  them  is 
their  inconsistency  and  the  diametrical  contradictions  between  them 
which  are  both  many  and  baffling.  Now  it  is  said  that  few  find  it; 
and  again  it  is  described  as  drawing  all  men  and  filling  the  world.  It  is 
very  hard  yet  very  easy  to  gain  admittance.  The  perfect  scribe  or  the 
most  exemplary  rabbi  who  would  stand  up  and  be  slain  rather  than 
defend  himself  on  the  Sabbath,  who  has  avoided  every  spot  of  Levitical 
uncleanness,  and  the  ingenuous  child  of  fortune,  who  from  his  youth 
has  kept  all  the  precepts  of  the  law,  both  lack  the  one  thing  needful, 
while  even  the  prodigal  who  has  broken  every  commandment  and 
wasted  his  substance  may  find  ready  access.  Sometimes  it  is  described 
with  a  wealth  of  biological  analogies,  as  coming  slowly  by  the  method 
of  natural  evolution,  the  blade,  then  the  ear;  or  it  grows  like  a  mustard 
seed,  and  while  we  sleep;  and  elsewhere  it  is  ushered  in  with  a  cataclysm 
of  changes  as  great  as  those  that  mark  the  advent  of  one  of  Plato's  new 
aeons  when  every  process  of  nature  is  reversed  and  the  gods  turn  all 
things  backward.  Sometimes  it  seems  very  material,  and  those  ambi- 
tious for  prestige  in  it  are  promised  thrones  and  judgeships,  or  refused 
them;  elsewhere  it  seems  purely  spiritual.  Now  it  seems  to  centre  at 
Jerusalem  and  to  irradiate  thence,  while  John  interprets  it  as  eternal 
life  in  a  transcendental  sense,  or  as  truth.  Now  it  seems  immediately 
impending,  all  the  prophecies  are  to  be  realized  now  before  the 
present  generation  has  passed,  and  we  should  await  daily,  if  not  hourly, 
some  eschatological  denouement;  while,  on  the  other  hand,  its  coming 
may  be  indefinitely  postponed  for  centuries  and  millennia,  and  perhaps 
the  counter  kingdom  of  the  great  adversary  will  preponderate  for  a 
time  to  test  faith.  Thus  even  more  than  ancient  prophecies  the  utter- 
ances concerning  the  Kingdom  are  strangely  timeless  and  lack  the 
perspective  that  distinguishes  between  things  near  and  far,  even  in 
time  and  space,  and  it  is  often  impossible  to  tell  whether  we  are  reading 
of  the  fall  of  Jerusalem  or  the  beginning  of  the  Kingdom,  or  the  end  of 
the  world. 


MESSIANITY,  SONSHIP,  AND  THE  KINGDOM  359 

Before  considering  Jesus'  ideas  of  the  Kingdom  in  detail,  it  should 
be  noted  again  that  the  more  we  study  the  Gospels  the  clearer  does  it 
become  that  everything  in  them  is  in  a  state  of  rapid  change  and  de- 
velopment. They  are  not  static,  as  has  commonly  been  thought,  but 
dynamic.  Much  that  seems  discrepant  is  due  to  the  fact  that  different 
stages  of  development  are  represented,  and  all  growth  is  from  a 
severely  logical  standpoint  per  se  inconsistent.  If  Jesus  said  all  that  is 
ascribed  to  him  about  the  Kingdom,  those  who  seek  to  know  his  mature 
views  concerning  it  are  in  the  position  of  one  given  every  saying  of  a 
great  man  on  a  great  theme  from  childhood  on  and  told  that  they  are 
all  put  forth  at  the  same  time,  stage,  or  level  of  his  development.  On 
this  theme  his  consciousness  was  most  metamorphic,  and  we  can  make 
no  progress  till  we  have  some  scale  on  which  to  measure  his  develop- 
ment. Probably,  too,  he  was  most  fluctuating  and  uncertain,  con- 
stantl}^  passing  from  cruder  to  finer  conceptions  of  it  and  vice  versa. 
How  little  sense  of  historic  and  still  less  of  genetic  sequence  the  Evange- 
lists had  is  seen  in  the  vast  diversity  of  order  of  those  events  and  of 
the  sajdngs  about  the  Kingdom  which  they  all  record  in  common. 
They  were  not  in  a  position  to  realize  the  development  of  Jesus'  own 
soul,  and  the  conceptions  of  his  divine  nature  in  the  Church  since  have 
made  this  interpretation  inapplicable  because  of  Jesus'  complete  dei- 
fication. So  long  as  his  consciousness  was  deemed  perfect  and  infalli- 
ble from  the  start  the  problem  of  apologetics  had  to  be  merely  to  mosaic 
everything  into  one  picture,  whereas  the  conception  of  stages  of  greater 
or  less  maturity  gives  us  a  vital  moving  picture,  simplifies  Christolog}^, 
puts  everything  in  better  perspective,  and  thus  makes  the  mind  and 
life  of  Jesus  more  accessible.  To  arrange  all  the  data  in  order  along 
the  various  lines  of  development  is  the  problem  of  genetic  psychology. 
It  is  neither  so  very  great  nor  hard,  and  although  it  cannot  be  finished, 
it  can  be  roughly  sketched. 

The  earlier  and  lower  stages  of  Jesus'  development  are  of  course 
hopelessly  lost,  although  this  loss  is  perhaps  less  serious  than  has  been 
thought  because  it  was  largely  within  the  ranges  of  the  normal  growth 
of  higher  human  nature.  The  Gospels  are  precious  because  they  are 
devoted,  not  to  the  early  stages  which  are  more  common  to  all  men, 
but  to  the  later  stages  of  the  rapid  evolution  of  Jesus'  higher  nature 
wherein  other  stories  were  added  that  constituted  his  supremacy. 
We  see  him  first  when  he  had  passed  through  the  steps  of  unfoldment 


o 


60  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

common  to  the  best  type  of  men  and  had  entered  upon  a  series  of  post- 
adolescent  steps  of  psychic  evolution  that  were  pecuHar  to  himself.  To 
this  there  is  only  the  one  great  exception  of  his  naive  and  almost  un- 
conscious attainment  of  a  unique  sense  of  oneness  with  God  before  his 
baptism,  to  be  described  below.  We  can  never  forget,  unfortunately, 
that  these  are  described  by  writers  who,  while  they  profoundly  appre- 
ciated all  they  could  in  any  degree  understand,  and  wrote  in  a  spirit  of 
utter  fidelity  to  what  they  could  not  fathom,  were  quite  inadequate  to 
their  task  in  general  and  lacked  all  sense  of  the  temporal  order  of 
events,  believing  this  of  no  consequence.  For  them  everything  was  on 
one  plane.  Moreover,  time  itself  was  soon  to  end  and  hence  was  a 
discredited  category.  Thus  sequences  are  as  difficult  to  make  out 
between  the  facts  contained  in  the  Gospel  record  as  in  the  order  of 
events  Jesus  had  in  mind  for  the  final  ushering  in  of  his  Kingdom. 
Thanks  to  recent  criticism  we  can,  however,  now  discern  stages  in 
the  development  of  the  record  of  Jesus'  Hfe.  Wendt  has  marked  a 
distinct  advance  along  this  Hne  in  massing  what  seems  conclusive  proof 
that  the  Fourth  Gospel  represents  a  later  redaction  of  one  very  early 
and  authentic  but  independent  apostolic  tradition,  which  was  wTought 
into  its  present  form  without  knowledge  of  the  synoptists  although 
using  some  of  the  original  sources  they  knew,  and  hence  in  essential 
accord  with  them.  This  \new  is  confirmed  by  the  fact  that  the  subse- 
quent development  of  Christian  doctrine  in  the  early  Church  was  not 
along  the  lines  of  the  Fourth  Gospel,  which  looked  mainly  to  the  past 
and  was  little  coloured  by  the  future,  nor  even  by  the  contemporaneous 
developments  in  the  larger  environment  of  Christendom.  John  rather 
consists  largely  of  the  discourses  of  Jesus,  longer  and  shorter,  which 
according  to  this  view  belong  to  the  latter  part  of  his  public  career,  but 
many  of  which  we  regard  as  referring  to  conceptions  which  arose  in 
Jesus'  mind  before  his  public  career  began.  These  so  often  only  am  ■ 
plify  the  more  concise  statements  of  the  other  Evangelists  that  our 
verdict  concerning  the  chief  teachings  of  Jesus,  and  even  their  essential 
authenticity,  need  not  wait  for  the  further  w^ork  that  critical  scholar- 
ship has  yet  to  do  in  detail,  large  as  that  work  is.  If  Jesus  really 
taught  one  coherent  doctrine  the  main  perspective  of  its  parts  is  not 
likely  to  change. 

Again,  it  is  plain  that  Jesus  did  not  attain  any  such  definiteness 
of  conviction  in  his  own  soul  concerning  either  the  detailed  constitution 


MESSIANITY,  SONSHIP,  AND  THE  KINGDOM  361 

of  the  Kingdom  or  the  program  of  its  inauguration,  as  he  did  con- 
cerning his  Messianity  and  sonship.  Perhaps  he  wisely  forbore  to 
go  into  details,  either  because  he  felt  limitations  in  himself  or  believed 
it  better  to  give  general  hints,  apergus,  and  suggestions  fit  to  stimulate 
and  capable  of  diverse  types  of  realization.  He  must,  however,  have 
seen  that  to  interpret  the  Kingdom  in  detail  when  there  were  no  less 
conflicting  conceptions  of  it  than  of  Messianity  itself,  would  be  a  matter 
of  great  delicacy,  and  no  matter  how  it  was  done  would  increase  antago- 
nisms. Perhaps  he  only  dimly  felt  or  intuited  certain  main  features 
of  it  which  might  have  grown  more  coherent  and  expUcit  had  he  lived 
longer.  Indeed,  some  have  thought  that  he  had  a  program  in  which 
sole  attention  to  the  Kingdom  was  placed  later.  On  such  assumptions 
we  must  regard  all  his  statements  and  implications  concerning  the 
Kingdom  as  material  for  such  psychoanalysis  as  we  can  make,  and 
here  more  than  anywhere  else  we  must  seek  to  get  beneath  the  con- 
sciousness of  Jesus  (which  for  many  recent  writers  is  the  cardinal  ques- 
tion) to  the  deeper  strata  of  his  unconscious  soul.  We  must  indeed 
boldly  attempt  nothing  less  than  interpreting  to  a  certain  extent  what 
he  said  into  what  he  meant,  and  strive  to  penetrate  from  the  patent 
to  the  latent  content  of  his  ideas  of  the  Kingdom,  a  task  not  only  deli- 
cate but  so  difficult  that  it  can  be  completed  only  when  we  know  far 
more  than  we  do  at  present  concerning  the  nature  of  the  submerged 
factors  of  the  human  soul. 

In  pursuit  of  this  purpose  we  must  first  of  all  realize  the  nature 
of  the  unique  theanthropic  self-consciousness  of  Jesus,  which  is 
commonly  interpreted  as  having  two  sides,  (i)  On  the  one  hand, 
so  far  as  he  had  come  to  be  dominated  by  the  supernormal  complex 
of  his  Messianity  his  Kingdom  must  be  of  this  earth.  He  would  be 
influenced  in  forming  it  by  the  conception  of  the  type  of  life  represented 
by  the  patriarchal  sheik,  Abraham,  with  whom  the  old  covenant  was 
made,  which  was  naturally  compared  with  the  new  covenant  which 
Jesus  established.  Still  more,  perhaps,  would  he  be  influenced  by  the 
ideals  of  the  theocracy,  and  perhaps  more  yet  by  the  glory  of  the  Davidic 
kingdom  to  which  he  was  the  legitimate  heir,  and  most  of  all 
doubtless  by  the  Zion  of  the  prophets.  How  much  each  of  these  four 
determinants  or  factors  entered  into  his  conception  of  the  Kingdom 
can  never  be  known,  but  all  were  present  and  contributed  features. 
The  Messiah  must  be  the  great  restorer  and  realizer  of  ancient  purpose 


362  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

and  longings,  and  it  must  be  in  this  world,  probably  centring  in 
Jerusalem. 

(2)  But  Jesus  was  also  dominated  by  the  deep  and  sublime  convic- 
tion that  he  was  the  Son  of  God  and  as  such  his  Kingdom  was  not  of 
this  earth  but  heavenly.  The  new  Jerusalem  was  a  celestial  city  of 
God,  estabHshed  in  the  empyrean  beyond  the  clouds.  It  was  an  apoc- 
alyptic \dsion  of  the  home  of  the  great  and  good  dead,  under  the  ir.-- 
mediate  rule  of  God  on  his  throne  and  the  glorified  Son  sitting  at  his 
right  hand.  In  proportion  as  Jesus  saw  his  work  on  earth  threatened 
and  nearing  its  end,  it  was  this  transcendental  Kingdom  that  became 
dominant  in  his  mind;  thus  the  sonship  constellation  or  personaUty 
impelled  to  a  supernal,  just  as  the  Messianic  complex  did  to  a  terres- 
trial, realm.  Again,  the  Jenseits  stood  over  against  and  was  in  some 
sense  antithetical  to  the  Diesseits,  and  as  either  one  grew  near  or 
seemed  real  the  other  tended  to  fade.  Were  either  lost  the  other 
would  be  a  resource  or  consolation.  There  must  have  been  at 
some  stage  a  schizophrenic  tension  in  Jesus'  own  soul  as  he  envisaged 
these  two  disparate  ideals,  and  some  of  his  utterances  concerning 
the  one  realm  are  quite  irreconcilable  with  those  concerning  the 
other. 

(3)  How  and  how  far  the  immanent  and  transcendent  conceptions 
of  the  Kingdom  came  to  be  harmonized,  is  a  problem  which  perhaps 
we  can  best  approach  by  collecting  and  grouping  all  the  characteriza- 
tions of  the  Kingdom,  without  reference  to  where  they  stand  in  the 
Gospels,  into  an  intelligible  genetic  order.  From  such  a  table  we  may 
opine  that  the  oldest  and  the  germ  of  all  was  the  conception  that  the 
Kingdom  was  entirely  within  the  individual.  The  regenerate  soul 
found  itself  in  a  new  realm.  The  passion  to  love  and  serve  God  made 
all  else  seem  unattractive  and  uninteresting,  and  the  world  undenvent 
a  radical  transvaluation.  There  was  a  new  joy,  peace,  health,  vigour, 
love  in  the  soul,  that  nothing  could  surpass.  Nothing  could  express 
the  inner  sense  of  beatitude  and  the  invincible  certitude  of  having 
found  the  chief  end  of  life.  The  first  promise  of  the  Kingdom  in  the 
Gospels  is  to  the  poor  in  spirit,  or  to  those  who  make  the  least  demands 
upon  life  for  themselves,  and  also  to  those  persecuted  for  righteousness' 
sake,  that  is,  to  those  who  have  abandoned  the  ambitions  of  this  world 
or  been  unjustly  outlawed  by  it.  The  Kingdom  at  first  consisted  of 
Jesus  and  his  disciples,  and  they  had  followed  the  Baptist's  proclama- 


MESSIANITY,  SONSHIP,  AND  THE  KINGDOM  363 

tion,  " Repent,  for  the  Kingdom  of  Heaven  is  at  hand."  To  repent  in- 
deed was  to  be  born  into  it.  To  confess  and  forsake,  that  is,  to  evict 
evil,  is  self-initiation  into  it.  It  does  not  come  by  outer  observation 
but  is  within  each.  This  is  the  Kingdom  we  must  first  seek,  and  to 
it  all  else  will  be  added.  To  those  who  do  this  it  is  given  to  know  its 
mysteries.  Thus  it  is  a  hidden  treasure,  a  pearl  of  great  price.  In 
fine,  it  is  found  in  Christian  experience. 

(4)  But  man  is  gregarious,  a  socius,  and  no  man  lives  to  himself. 
The  new  life  is  not  only  intensely  inward  and  solitary,  but  must  have 
vent  and  companionship,  and  the  outer  Kingdom  begins  in  collectivity, 
sharing  all  things.  Each  must  confess  and  exhort  the  others.  The 
newborn  must  assemble  and  pray  with  and  for  and  impart  all  to  all 
in  a  new  community.  The  lofty  classic  traditions  of  amicitia,  or 
friendship  as  represented  by  Aristotle  and  Cicero,  must  be  developed 
into  the  yet  higher  brotherly  love  and  mutual  service,  which  must  be 
with  abandon.  Not  only  must  the  Golden  Rule  be  followed,  but  each 
must  prefer  the  other  to  himself.  Thus  a  new  and  higher  soHdarity, 
tj-pified  by  the  sacred  symposium  of  the  Lord's  Supper  and  by  the 
agapcB  or  love-feasts,  with  their  perilous  embrace  and  kiss,  is  symbolic 
of  the  very  closest  of  all  ties  of  affection,  above  those  even  of  husband 
and  wife,  parent  and  child.  Perhaps  never  was  mutual  service  such  a 
passion.  In  such  union  there  is  strength  indeed,  and  wherever  so 
few  gathered  in  the  spirit  the  Lord  was  present  with  them.  No  such 
communion  of  soul  was  ever  possible  before.  Men  never  got  so  near 
together  as  did  these  early  Christians,  heartening  one  another  to  endure 
hardship  and  even  the  most  cruel  martyrdom.  "How  the  Christians 
love  one  another!"  was  the  comment.  In  all  the  hundreds  of  types  of 
organization,  secret  and  open,  before  and  since,  for  cultural,  convivial, 
reformatory,  reciprocal,  health,  business  and  financial  enterprises, 
and  all  the  rest,  there  was  never  such  merging  of  individual  ends  in  the 
comnaon  weal,  such  a  degree  of  utter  loyalty  to  a  common  cause,  or 
such  unreserved  sinking  of  personal  into  group  consciousness.  This 
little  Kingdom  (big  with  promise  and  potency  of  a  vaster  one)  was 
founded  with  a  sense  that  it  and  its  members  were  the  light,  the  salt, 
leaven,  seed,  of  a  new  world-order.  Other  Eldorados  have  been  largely 
external,  and  consisted  cliiefly  in  ideal  environments,  working  inward. 
This  was  a  new  inward  life  with  a  special  organ  of  its  own  working 
outward.    Others  have  been  political  or  aimed  at  civic  or  industrial 


364  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

ends,  but  this  was  primarily  and  purely  ethical,  based  solely  upon  the 
ideals  of  virtue,  morality,  justice,  and  mercy. 

Myth  at  its  best  is  larger  than  philosophy  or  literature,  for  no 
individual  can  compass  all  the  dimensions  of  a  great  mythopoeic  theme. 
It  underhes  rites,  beliefs,  customs,  and  cults,  and  is  almost  as  com- 
prehensive as  the  psychology  of  races.  Even  religions  may  be  almost 
said  to  live,  move,  and  have  their  being  in  it.  The  greatest  of  these 
ethnic  themes  is  that  of  an  ideal  social  state  or  a  realm  where  all  that  is 
coincides  with  all  that  ought  to  be.  Sometimes  this  ideal  is  very  crass 
and  sensuous.  It  is  often  described  with  great  poetic  license  and  aban- 
don; e.  g.,  the  north  pole  blossoms,  dolphins  carry  men,  the  seas  are 
lemonade  or  wine,  the  earth  yields  exuberant  fruits  without  toil,  the 
land  flows  with  milk  and  honey.  It  is  a  realm  of  the  magic  Tarnkappc, 
wand,  bowl,  sword,  ring,  boat.  Perhaps  there  are  fairies,  diamond 
pavements,  no  deserts,  disease,  or  pain.  The  gods  are  friendly  and 
familiar.  Old  age  is  curable  in  a  Fountain  of  Youth.  The  world  is 
young,  man  pure  and  unfallen.  The  earth  is  full  of  beauty;  and  war, 
fear,  anger,  and  hate  are  unknown.  These  paradises  of  old  are  often 
placed  in  the  past,  and  the  idylls  or  sagas  about  them  are  cradle-songs 
of  primitive  and  perhaps  autochthonic  men.^  Perhaps  Warren-  is 
right  that  this  cunahulum  gentium  was  near  the  north  pole,  while  for 
very  different  reasons  Wallace  thinks  it  may  have  been  Siberian. 
Haeckel  identifies  it  with  his  sunken  Lemuria,  in  the  Indian  Ocean. 
Others  suggest  a  sunken  Atlantis  between  Africa  and  South  America, 
of  which  modern  theosophists  have  given  us  such  a  detailed  story. 
Columbus  thought  it  up  the  Orinoco,  which  he  deemed  one  of  the  four 
streams  flowing  down  from  paradise  where  heaven  and  earth  joined 
and  where  he  would  perhaps  find  a  sacred  omphalos  where  earth's  navel 
string  with  heaven  had  been  cut.  For  Dante  it  was  on  the  summit  of 
the  purgatorial  mountain.  Philology  has  suggested  the  Northern 
Himalayas  or  Eastern  Persia.  One  anthropologist  puts  it  in  Scandi- 
navia, and  thinks  Adam  spoke  Swedish.  Perhaps  the  Flood  wiped  out 
traces  of  it.  Nor  was  it  all  a  fata  morgana  or  real  Eldorado,  but  it 
made  a  convenient  point  of  departure  for  the  history  of  many  people 
for  which  it  furnished  so  pregnant  a  prologue.  In  classic  days  its 
outlines  were  fancied  as  the  age  of  Saturn,  or  when  Kronos  ruled  before 


'Edmund  Pfleiderer:  "Die  Idee  eines  goldenen  Zeitalters."    Berlin,  Reimer,  1877,  i7»  p. 
*Wm.  Fairfield  Warren:  "Paradise  Found."    Boston,  Houghton  Miflflin,  1886,  305  p. 


MESSIANITY,  SONSHIP,  AND  THE  KINGDOM  365 

the  Olympian  dynasty.  The  Roman  saturnaHa  were  kept  as  a  memor- 
ial of  it,  and  there  were  presents  and  games.  Slaves  were  sers^ed  by 
tlieir  masters  until  it  degenerated  to  Bacchanalian  license.  For  the 
Jews  one  day  in  seven  was  kept  in  memory  of  it  as  sacred  to  paradise, 
and  the  year  of  jubilee  to  prevent  gra\dtation  of  capital  into  a  few  hands 
was  commemorative  of  it.  It  was  the  point  where  eternity  touched 
time.  Indeed  it  is  so  purely  mythic  that  the  very  conditions  of  its 
existence  have  never  been  reaUzed,  but  probably  as  Pfleiderer  says  it 
is  true  to  the  law,  ^^  Das  Schone  bliiht  nur  im  Gesang^^  and  these  writers 
postulate  everyvhere  what  exists  nowhere. 

Great  things  have  been  done  in  the  past.  Not  only  has  language 
evolved  but  along  with  it,  in  even  its  primitive  forms,  the  most  mar- 
■\'ellous  grammatical  construction.  Instinct  has  developed  perhaps  as 
lapsed  intelligence.  Early  social  institutions  often  seem  to  be  the 
work  of  unfathomable  intelligence.  Utopia  may  be  located  in  the 
country  for  the  city  child,  and  indeed  it  was  for  Rousseau.  Vergil's 
"Bucolics"  were  written  and  had  great  charm  because  Greek  and 
Roman  civilization  were  decaying,  and  often  Hyperboreans,  Getae, 
Thracians,  were  used  as  symbols  of  regenerative  energies  as  were  the 
ancient  Germans  by  Tacitus.  So  in  the  French  Revolution  the  cry  was 
"Back  to  nature,"  and  there  were  abundant  dreams  and  romances  of  a 
new  dispensation  when  man  rollicked  and  frolicked  in  Arcadia  and 
realized  the  importance  at  least  of  not  losing  barbaric  virtues  in  develop- 
ing those  of  culture.  But  the  wisest  men  long  ago  began  to  see  that  if 
any  such  apotheosis  of  social  man  really  occurred  it  would  be  in  the 
future,  was  not  in  the  past;  for  man  has  evolved  from  an  animal  state  and 
the  twilight  of  the  gods  is  the  dusk  not  of  evening  but  of  dawn.  Hence 
the  passion  for  progress,  and  hence  so  many  men  and  races,  like  the 
ancient  alchemists,  have  died  from  drinking  their  own  elixir  of  cultural, 
social,  political  reform.  All  the  scores  of  early  constitutions  that  Aris- 
totle collected  had  fatal  flaws,  and  our  star  of  paradise  is  a  morning  and 
not  an  evening  star. 

The  working  power  of  these  popular  ideals  has  been  incomparable. 
In  contrast  with  them  those  of  Saint-Simon,  Fourier,  Prudhomme, 
Rodbertus,  La  Salle,  Comte,  and  all  modern  social  reformers  since 
Bellamy  and  George  and  professional  sociologists,  are  partial,  fragmen- 
tary, and  superficial.  Indeed,  not  only  society  but  even  business  is 
far  too  complex  to  be  grasped  by  any  individual  mind.    And  yet  true 


366  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

statesmanship  requires  mastery  in  just  this  field;  and  many  a  writer, 
from  Aristotle  down  to  the  anonymous  author  of  "Rembrandt  als 
Erzieher"  have  agreed  that  the  supreme  artist  is  he  who  deals  with  the 
material  of  human  nature.  He  will  be  a  doer,  and  so  far  beyond  the 
professor  who  merely  knows.  But  society  is  a  monster  obeying  its 
own  laws,  which  we  are  just  beginning  to  understand  and  may  construe 
mathematically  according  to  Jevons  or  Walras,  or  biologically  like 
Lilienfeld,  Schaeffle,  or  Worms,  with  its  own  anatomy,  physiology, 
pathology.  But  we  had  better  more  modestly  begin  with  Tarde,  who 
studied  single  laws,  or  with  Letourneau,  and  start  vdth.  beginnings  of 
single  institutions  if  not  with  animal  societies  like  Espinas  and  Perrier, 
or  with  small  country  communities  like  the  school  of  Du  Prey. 

Much  as  the  cult  of  Jesus  owed  to  the  cults  of  dying  and  rising  gods 
all  about  it,  his  conceptions  of  the  Kingdom  owed  nothing  to  these 
pagan  ideals  of  a  golden  age,  but  from  first  to  last  stood  in  sharpest 
contrast  to  them  in  two  fundamental  points.  It  began  within,  and  it 
was  purely  ethical.  If  we  put  the  burden  of  Jesus'  teaching  into  mod- 
ern psychological  terms,  it  is  that  if  the  individual  utterly  subordinates 
himself  to  love  and  serve  his  fellow-man,  which  is  the  quintessence  of 
morahty,  and  to  love  and  serve  God,  who  represents  the  all-embracing 
universe,  which  is  the  quintessence  of  religion,  he  comes  into  a  new  and 
hitherto  undiscovered  or  at  least  unexplored  continent  of  human  ex- 
perience. It  is  of  a  higher  order,  and  brings  new  insights  into  the  world, 
which  takes  on  a  unitary,  ethical,  spiritual  character,  and  brings  a 
new  reinforcement  of  the  will  and  a  new  depth  and  range  of  emotion 
not  only  humanistic  but  cosmic.  This  experience  is  so  sui  generis 
that  it  seems  to  come  ah  extra  like  a  revelation  or  a  gift.  It  not  only 
subordinates  volition  to  its  purpose  but  impels  it  with  the  momentum 
of  the  main  current  of  history  and  evolution.  So  new  is  it  that  it  must 
have  miracles  as  tropes  of  this  humanization  of  the  world's  dynamism. 
It  also  suffuses  the  soul  with  a  love  not  only  of  man  but  of  all  being 
which  far  transcends  the  best  that  sex  love  has  to  offer.  Just  because 
such  experience  is  unique  and  exalted  and  becomes  possible  only  long 
after  the  means  of  expression  had  been  developed,  it  cannot  be  ade-, 
quately  described  but  always  seems  a  mystery,  a  state  superinduced 
as  from  on  high.  Individuation  develops  to  its  uttermost,  and  having 
attained  its  goal  it  becomes  completely  subordinated  to  the  race.  It 
is  so  blessed  that  if  the  best  and  richest  of  men,  most  widely  known 


MESSIANITY,  SONSHIP,  AND  THE  KINGDOM  367 

and  praised,  were  to  make  himself  an  obscure  pauper,  deliberately 
destroy  his  good  name  and  become  an  object  of  hate  and  contempt, 
suffer  all  pain,  and  leave  his  family,  like  Buddha,  all  these  would  seem 
as  dross  if  he  thereby  gained  this  pecuHar  experience,  which  is  related 
to  ordinary  Hfe  somewhat  as  the  deathless  germ  plasm  is  to  the  mori- 
bund soma.  This  can  never  be  fully  believed  on  testimony.  It  must 
be  tried  and  experimentally  proven.  It  is  not  meant,  perhaps,  that 
all  should  go  so  far,  but  only  a  few;  but  all  must  go  far  enough  to  have 
faith  in  the  fact  of  this  higher  potentialization  of  Hfe  by  realizing  that 
much  of  it  can  be  attained  with  less  than  supreme  renunciation.  This 
subjection  to  the  species  is  only  the  law  of  life  in  the  plant-  and  animal- 
world,  where  every  detail  of  form  and  function  is  never  for  the  individ- 
ual but  always  in  the  interests  of  the  species.  To  break  away  from 
this  law  and  to  set  up  for  self  violates  nature  and  constitutes  the  bottom 
sin  or  disease  in  the  world. 

Although  gradually  attained  by  him,  this  experience  was  the  heart 
of  the  heart  of  Jesus'  life.  It  gave  it  a  unique  organic  unity  that  doc- 
trinal systems  can  only  faintly  mirror  or  typify.  This  experience  was 
the  apperception  organ  by  which  he  knew  and  interpreted  everything 
in  his  ken.  It  gave  harmony  and  consistency  to  the  most  contradic- 
tory things  that  he  said  concerning  the  Kingdom,  such  as  whether  it 
was  inner  or  outer,  of  this  world  or  another.  He  knew  that  this  con- 
ception would  grow  and  transform  the  world,  and  that  it  represented  a 
higher  plane  of  life  which  would  never  be  entirely  lost.  This  was  the 
first  theme  of  his  teaching  before  he  had  developed  a  sense  of  his  own 
relation  to  it  as  Messiah  or  Son  of  God,  which  so  transformed  it,  and 
he  began  by  describing  its  inner  charm  to  those  who  could  enter  it. 
As  opposition  grew  and  the  available  time  seemed  short,  he  developed 
a  steadily  increasing  sense  of  the  calamity  of  missing  it  and  of  the 
doom  of  those  who  did  so.  In  doing  this  he  borrowed  his  imagery 
from  the  great  prophets  of  the  captivity,  especially  Daniel,  with  whom 
there  began  a  unique  apocalyptic  style  which  affected  not  only  canon- 
ical but  apocryphal  writings.^  This  had  its  own  vocabulary  of  char- 
acteristic Hebrew  words  which  Harper  has  compiled,  and  which  is  so 
marked  in  Enoch.  It  is  a  unique  Hterary  phenomenon,  and  requires 
some  special  interpretation.     It  is  more  commonly  used  in  treating 


>H.  P.  Nichols:  "The  Temporary  and  Permanent  in  the  New  Testament  Revelation."   New  York,  igos.    Lecture  6, 
See,  too,  Harper:  "The  Prophetic  Element  in  the  Old  Testament."    Chicago,  igos,  p.  laS  et  seq. 


368  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

such  topics  as  death,  resurrection,  judgment,  millennium,  heaven  and 
hell,  and  is  most  marked  in  Jesus*  eschatological  utterances.  Its  fig- 
ures are  intense,  sometimes  gross,  a  trifle  fantastic,  artificial,  enigmatic, 
and  even  contradictory.  It  is  commonly  appUed  to  mysteries  that 
were  challenging,  and  it  makes  Daniel  seem  arrogant  and  better  in- 
formed concerning  the  next  world  than  this.  Its  conjuring  phrases 
are  often  repeated.  Its  religion  is  catastrophic,  so  that  it  has  always 
been  a  favourite  of  Montanists,  chiliasts,  and  Adventists.  It  is  not 
the  style  of  history,  fact,  or  prose,  but  of  poetry  and  vision,  and  its 
theology  might  be  described  as  sung.  Weiss  thinks  that  Jesus'  use 
of  this  resource,  especially  after  the  shadow  of  the  cross  fell  upon  his 
life,  was  often  exaggerated,  but  these  phrases  gave  him  courage  and 
strength  in  desperate  state.  The  synoptists  remembered,  loved,  and 
best  recorded  these  utterances  which  are  often  devotional  and  have  ever 
since  frequently  recurred  in  liturgies  and  lectionaries.  It  was  the 
style  of  the  Sabbath  rather  than  the  week-day.  We  cannot  entirely 
agree  with  Muirhead^  that  their  key  has  been  found;  for  they  have 
always  given  rise  to  the  greatest  diversity  of  interpretation,  so  that  just 
what  they  mean  is  the  most  challenging  of  all  the  problems  in  the 
New  Testament.  What  ought  to  be  is,  shall  be,  and  always  was,  every- 
where. The  coming  of  the  Kingdom  is  entirely  conditioned  by  man's 
responses  to  it.  It  gave  elasticity  to  apostolic  institutions  and  ordi- 
nances, and  is  well  fitted  to  the  use  of  those  who  wish  to  apply  all  the 
resources  at  their  command  to  the  need  of  the  present  moment,  so 
that  despite  its  hazy  mysticism  it  is  intensely  practical. 

Unlike  all  pagan  conceptions  of  the  last  things  or  the  social 
summum  bonum,  the  moral  dualism  of  the  Kingdom  is  intense.  All  bene- 
fited in  the  gentile  conceptions  of  an  ideal  state;  but  in  Jesus'  concep- 
tion there  was  to  be  a  great  sifting,  and  all  the  bad  were  to  be  swept 
away.  As  his  obsession  of  impending  judgment  grew,  he  beheved 
and  used  to  the  uttermost  the  tremendous  stimulus  of  his  conviction 
that  it  was  not  only  certain  but  very  near.  He  had  no  presentiment 
of  the  millennia  that  were  to  intervene.  The  barren  fig-tree  was  given 
only  the  briefest  respite.  His  followers  were  to  pray  for  it,  and  watch 
every  sign  of  its  approach.  When  it  came  it  would  be  a  catastrophe 
of  inconceivable  magnitude.  Nature  would  be  convulsed,  trans- 
formed, the  powers  of  evil  let  loose.    All  the  vengeance  since  Abel 

*"  Eschatology  of  Jesus."    New  York,  1904. 


MESSIANITY,  SONSHIP,  AND  THE  KINGDOM  369 

would  be  poured  out.  The  doom  of  the  world  would  be  like  that  of 
Sodom  and  Gomorrah,  and  Wendt  thinks  that  some  of  the  phrases 
descriptive  of  it  were  interpolated,  being  reflected  back  from  the  fall  of 
Jerusalem.  Hence  his  followers  must  be  ever  ready,  for  the  end  might 
come  at  any  moment.  It  was  not  necessary  to  organize  even  the 
apostolate,  or  weed  tares  from  the  wheat.  Although  the  disciples  were 
sent  like  sheep  among  wolves,  they  must  do  their  work  with  all  dis- 
patch like  those  who  warn  sleeping  villages  of  a  breaking  dam  and  a 
great  inundation.  They  must  shout  their  message  from  the  housetop, 
and  take  all  risks  and  dangers. 

Besides  the  scores  of  specific  mentions  in  the  synoptists  of  the 
Kingdom  it  was  the  chief  theme  of  Jesus'  teachings  and  it  was  to  pre- 
serve his  sayings  about  it  that  the  logia  were  gathered.  Not  only  are 
his  utterances  as  they  stand,  however,  hopelessly  discordant  and  con- 
tradictory, but,  from  Holtzmann's  collection  of  definitions  of  it  as  inter- 
preted by  scholars,  their  ideas  of  what  Jesus  meant  by  it  are  no  less 
irreconcilable.  From  this  the  only  sane  inference  is  that  if  the  sayings 
represent  one  fixed  or  final  stage,  then  his  mind  was  in  utter  confusion 
about  it,  if,  indeed,  he  did  not  have  delusions  respecting  it  that  were 
not  even  systematized.  In  the  social  Christian  movement  of  the  last 
two  decades,  which  has  made  the  Kingdom  the  theme  of  most  active 
and  voluminous  discussion,  almost  every  phrase  of  Jesus  touching  it 
has  been  made  central  for  the  interpretation  of  the  rest,  and  about 
every  reform — ^personal,  social,  business,  political,  religious,  moral,  wise, 
or  otherwise — has  been  given  his  sanction,  although  there  is  generally 
a  transcendental  residuum  of  utterances  which  has  been  treated  with  a 
very  different  theological  and  mystic  Einstellung. 

The  chief  directive  lines  (Richtlinien)  along  which  all  his  sayings 
can  be  arranged  are  the  following:  (a)  the  Kingdom  is  inner  or  outer, 
(b)  It  is  on  earth  or  in  heaven,  that  is,  in  this  Hfe  or  the  next,  (c)  It 
is  present  or  future,  (d)  It  is  of  slow  growth  or  comes  with  cata- 
strophic suddenness,  (e)  It  is  attained  by  struggle,  or  is  a  free  gift 
to  be  received  passively,  (f)  It  has  a  benign  aspect  for  the  good  and  a 
malign  one  for  the  bad ;  i.  e.,  it  comes  as  a  boon  to  the  former  and  a  doom 
to  the  latter,  (g)  It  comes  more  or  less  independently  of  Jesus,  or  he  is 
the  central  agent  in  bringing  it  in,  and  its  head.  Everything  said  of  it 
has  its  place  on  one  or  all  of  these  seven  lines  of  antithesis.  Arranging 
them  on  such  a  scale,  the  only  possible  conclusion  is  that  each  group  of 


370  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

them  thus  deployed  represents  a  genetic  stage  in  the  development 
of  Our  Lord's  views  about  it  or  that  these  lines  are  developmental. 
Thus  from  first  to  last  his  conceptions  of  it  were  in  a  state  of  rapid 
evolutionary  flux  and  transformation,  and  the  inconsistencies  and 
contradictions  are  those  that  are  always  involved  in  grov/th.  Can  any 
reordering  of  these  give  us  a  clue  to  thrid  the  maze  and  escape  the  chaos 
of  present  interpretations?  As  a  perhaps  overbold  and  professedly 
tentative  psychoanalytic  first  step  the  following  is  suggested : 

I.  Jesus'  first  teaching  of  the  Kingdom  was  that  it  was  all  in- 
ward and  personal  rather  than  social.  It  was  righteousness,  joy, 
peace,  purity,  first  sanctifying  self.  It  was  in  the  invisible  realm  of  the 
individual  heart.  It  was  the  goal  of  all  the  good  tendencies  of  history, 
and  more  specifically  of  prophecy.  It.  meant  enthusiastic  moral  re- 
form, a  new  zest  toward  or  aspiration  forperf ection.  There  was  little  or 
nothing  of  the  Baptist's  awful  imprecations  or  threats,  no  new  dis- 
pensation coming  to  sweep  away  the  old  order  of  things  and  bring  in  a 
new  one.  Jesus  had  profited  by  the  fate  of  John  and  kept  aloof  from 
him,  and  his  doctrine  of  repentance  was  far  less  drastic.  He  had  him- 
self grown  into  the  new  higher  Hfe  naively  and  naturally  without 
convulsive  reconstruction,  and  assumed  in  others  the  possibility  of  do- 
ing as  he  had  done.  He  did  not  even  baptize,  but  regarded  this  rite 
as  simply  washing  away  uncleanness  and  not  as  a  baptism  of  fire.  His 
relation  to  those  he  taught  was  simply  that  of  one  who  had  found  the 
way  of  truth,  rest,  peace,  and  the  higher  life,  and  who  wished  others  to 
follow  in  the  steps  he  had  taken  before  his  baptism.  He  was  full  of  a 
great  new  joy  as  weU  as  of  the  all-transforming  insights  which  followed 
his  own  baptism,  and  sought  companions  and  disciples  in  this  fresh 
and  glowing  experience.  His  beatitudes  were  upon  a  simple,  single, 
humble,  clean  life  of  service  and  self-abnegation,  harmlessness,  non- 
resistance,  childlikeness.  Neither  Herod  nor  the  rabbis  could  fear  or 
object  to  this.  The  supreme  realm  of  what  ought  to  be  was  in  the 
heart.  To  discover  and  make  landfaU  on  this  new  world  within  was 
his  great  achievement  and  should  be  the  supreme  quest  of  life,  com- 
pared to  which  the  loss  of  eye  or  hand,  or  the  sacredest  of  family  ties, 
was  of  minor  account.  To  acquire  such  a  treasure  all  else  might  be 
sacrificed.  It  was  meat  and  drink  for  the  very  soul  that  others  knew 
not  of.  Thus,  having  lately  come  to  the  full  realization  of  his  own 
Messianity,  his  first  chief  task  was  to  interpret  the  Messianic  Kingdom, 


MESSIANITY,  SONSHIP,  AND  THE  KINGDOM  371 

and  thus  his  first  conception  of  it  was  sweet,  mild,  subjective,  as  the 
one  thing  of  supreme  worth.  It  was  so  hidden  and  inoffensive  that  no 
member  of  the  hierarchy  or  representative  of  the  state  could  object  or 
suspect,  for  he  seemed  only  a  preacher  of  a  more  perfect  individual 
holiness.  Thus  there  was  no  danger  of  any  such  calamity  to  him  or  his 
cause  as  had  befallen  the  Baptist.  At  this  stage  Jesus  made  no  ene- 
mies. To  it  would  probably  belong  the  parables  of  the  prodigal  son, 
the  lost  sheep  and  penny,  perhaps  the  sower,  forgiveness  seventy 
times  seven,  no  fasting  when  the  bridegroom  is  present,  the  eleventh- 
hour  labourer,  the  budding  fig-tree  as  a  herald  of  spring,  the  city  on  a 
hill,  the  scribe  instructed  in  the  Kingdom,  etc.  This  stage  of  Jesus' 
teaching  was  illustrated  by  the  first  invitation  of  the  guests  to  a  feast. 
In  this  initial  stage  Jesus'  tone  was  most  exuberant.  Hope  was  at  its 
highest,  and  there  were  almost  no  antagonisms  or  oppositions.  All 
was  positive,  optimistic.  The  people  listened  gladly.  The  disciples 
whom  he  chose,  perhaps  with  less  critical  scrutiny  because  of  the  gen- 
eral spirit  of  buoyancy,  left  all  and  followed  on  the  instant,  and  this 
presaged  an  easy,  triumphant,  and  unresisted  progress.  Thus  Jesus 
began  at  the  positive  end  of  each  of  the  above  lines  from  (a)  to  (f)  in- 
clusive, although  the  chief  progress  was  along  (g),  for  his  sense  of  his 
own  leadership  was  greatly  augmented. 

2.  But  his  fame  and  the  charm  and  magnetism  of  his  personality 
proved  very  effective  therapeutically  in  Galilee,  which  abounded  with 
neurotics,  and  in  an  age  when  cure  was  exorcism.  Thus,  besides  being 
a  physician  of  the  soul,  Jesus  found  himself  more  and  more  revered  as  a 
physician  of  the  body.  This  was  not  within  the  scope  of  his  first  pur- 
pose, and  gave  him  pause,  as  well  it  might.  His  human  sympathies 
made  it  hard  to  refuse  the  importunity  of  the  sick  and  their  friends, 
but  there  was  an  ominous  danger  of  diversion  from  his  prime  intention 
and  of  distracting  the  attention  of  his  hearers  from  his  doctrine.  Now 
came  the  first  clear  note  of  conflict  which  was  with  the  demons  whom 
he  expelled,  who  represented  the  hostile  kingdom  of  Satan.  It  was 
they  who  first  recognized  his  Messianity  and  his  lordship  over  them, 
if  somewhat  to  his  dismay.  Healing  was  a  victorious  sally  into  the 
territory  of  the  Great  Enemy  whom  after  his  death  he  was  to  despoil  in 
his  stronghold.  This  therapeutic  work  brought  new  acclaim  and  gave 
his  mission  its  first  clear  note  of  militancy.  He  must  oppose  the 
counter-kingdom  of  the  great  adversary  at  every  step.    The  world  is 


372  JESUS   IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

dual,  and  good  and  evil  are  so  opposed  that  every  gain  of  either  means 
loss  to  the  other.  The  realization  that  he  had  power  over  Satan's 
realm  greatly  augmented  his  own  secret  sense  of  his  dignity,  for  it 
showed  that  his  work  had  a  supernatural  significance.  He  and  his 
Kingdom  stood  over  against  Satan  and  his  hosts.  It  was  from  his 
minions,  too,  that  he  heard  the  first  and  ardently  longed  for  recogni- 
tion of  the  ofiice  he  had  assumed  when  as  yet  no  one  else  knew  him  for 
what  he  was,  and  hence  there  was  a  great  advance  along  the  line  (g), 
for  his  person  and  work  now  had  a  supernal  sanction.  Along  (f)  there 
were  now  objects  of  abhorrence  and  imprecation  while  along  (e)  the 
element  of  struggle  was  emphasized,  and  on  line  (f)  this  earth  was  more 
or  less  transcended.  If  he  could  withstand  the  devil  he  must  be  sent 
by  God.  Cosmic  powers  were  involved  in  the  battle  now  on,  and  he 
was  heaven's  chosen  champion.  The  reahzation  of  all  this  was  an 
epoch  indeed.  Now  he  first  began  to  draw  upon  the  imagery  of 
Daniel.  Moreover,  as  the  enemy  was  transcendent,  so  must  the 
Kingdom  be  not  merely  of  earth  but  of  heaven.  It  could  no  longer 
remain  immanent  only.  Henceforth  what  he  said  of  it  might  always 
have  a  double  meaning.  Still,  the  individual  soul  was  the  theatre  of 
all  the  warfare,  while  the  conception  of  attaining  the  Kingdom  now 
underwent  much  modification.  It  was  not  easy,  but  hard,  to  win;  for 
there  was  resistance  by  the  powers  of  evil  at  every  step.  It  was  no 
longer  conceived  as  a  state  to  be  born  in  or  grow  into,  but  to  be  won 
by  conflict.  Sin,  too,  now  was  devils'  sickness  and  needed  more  drastic 
treatment.  The  new  life  was  less  spontaneous,  for  there  was  alwa}'s 
a  root  of  evil  to  be  plucked  out.  Fornication,  hypocrisy,  lies,  greed, 
sensuousness,  must  be  extirpated  and  not  charmed  away  by  the 
lure  of  beatitudes. 

3.  The  hierarchy  took  note  of  his  cures  as  it  had  not  of  his  doc- 
trine, and  accused  him  of  evicting  devils  as  Beelzebub  their  prince, 
the  most  truculent  and  blasphemous  of  charges.  Not  only  this,  but  he 
had  dared  to  take  the  rash  and  perhaps  ill-considered  step  of  pardoning 
the  sins  of  some  he  healed.  This  seemed  a  most  flagrant  usurpation  of 
divine  power.  Thus,  to  his  surprise  and  grief,  Jesus  found  not  only 
that  the  Kingdom  did  not  draw  all,  but  that  those  in  the  highest  places 
of  authority,  whom  he  had  been  taught  to  revere,  were  arrayed  against 
both  it  and  him.  We  can  understand  what  he  meant  when  in  removing 
the  physical  consequences  of  sin  he  pronounced  the  sins  of  his  patients 


MESSIANITY,  SONSHIP,  AND  THE  KINGDOM  373 

forgiven,  fatal  as  was  the  strategic  mistake  he  made  in  doing  so,  if 
he  wished  to  avoid  or  delay  the  rupture  with  Jewish  orthodoxy,  for 
now  it  was  at  as  implacable  enmity  with  his  cause  as  were  the  leagued 
demons.  The  prophets  of  old  had  defied  and  rebuked  not  only  kings 
but  priests;  but  there  had  never  been  so  open  and  bitter  a  warfare, 
and  now  the  gentle  Jesus  was  roused  to  the  utmost  rage  and  fury 
against  the  conservatives  in  the  very  faith  in  which  he  had  been  reared, 
and  had  to  fight  them  with  no  less  abandon,  if  by  different  methods, 
than  he  had  assailed  Satan's  agents.  His  Kingdom  could  not  be  set 
up  in  the  temple  or  even  at  Jerusalem  so  long  as  it  was  unoverturned. 
If  it  came  there  not  one  stone  would  remain  upon  another,  but  all  must 
be  rebuilt  from  the  foundation.  Its  rulers  were  blind  leaders  of  the 
blind,  unfaithful  tenants,  vipers,  whited  sepulchres,  and  their  cult  is  a 
barren  fig-tree  to  be  cut  down  and  burned.  Thus  now  the  cata- 
strophic conception  of  the  advent  of  the  Kingdom,  if  it  did  not  begin, 
had  here  its  chief  augmentation,  for  it  could  not  come  among  the 
gentiles,  but  must  be  a  new  Jerusalem,  and  hence  the  new  ictus  of  the 
apocalyptic  motif.  It  might  come  down  from  heaven,  but  at  the  very 
least  it  implied  a  radical  transformation.  Jesus  could  compel  demons 
but  not  the  souls  of  the  Pharisees,  and  so  God  as  the  only  recourse 
must  intervene.  Thus,  in  the  face  of  rabbinical  opposition  Jesus' 
unconquerable  soul  appealed  to  transcendental  divine  powers  to  effect 
the  great  metamorphosis  necessary  to  inaugurate  the  new  Kingdom. 
What  he  could  not  do  himself  God  would  accomplish,  and  would 
perfect  outwardly  what  he  had  begun  inwardly.  The  goal  of  life  which 
he  had  attained  was  so  blessed,  so  certainly  God's  final  purpose  in 
creating  man,  that  he  would  and  must  give  it  a  worthy  outer  installa- 
tion, and  that,  too,  among  his  own  chosen  people  in  the  land  of  the 
promises,  very  soon,  very  gloriously.  He  would  just  as  surely  do  so  as 
Jesus  was  the  Messiah.  The  disciplesdid  not  yet  know  whom  he  claimed 
to  be,  for  he  had  not  proclaimed  it ;  but  the  more  perspicacious  priest- 
hood had  clearly  divined  it,  for  indeed  he  had  himself  betrayed  it  in 
forgiving  sins  if  only  incidentally  to  heahng.  At  this  stage  it  was, 
therefore,  that  the  great  appeal  was  taken  to  Yahveh.  He  would 
overturn  in  the  Holy  Land  until  all  was  fit,  and  then  usher  in  the  King- 
dom, subduing  Satan,  binding  the  beast  of  poUtical  domination,  de- 
stroying the  wicked,  and  creating  a  new  earth  worthy  of  the  new  in- 
stallation of  man  into  his  true  Kingdom. 


374  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

4.  Finally,  as  Jesus  realized  that  he  must  die,  and  that  soon,  his 
conceptions  of  the  Kingdom  became  more  celestial  and  post-mortem. 
Admission  to  it  would  depend  upon  a  verdict  at  a  great  judgment  day 
for  which  the  dead  would  be  resurrected.  Earth  faded  somewhat  in 
his  thought  and  would  be  destroyed  by  fire;  and  the  good  go  to  dwell 
with  Abraham,  Isaac  and  Jacob,  and  the  wicked  be  consigned  to  hell- 
fire  forever.  The  Son  would  come  in  glory ;  the  elect  would  be  gathered 
and  transported  to  heaven.  The  Kingdom  was  spiritual  in  the  skies. 
The  day  of  probation,  grace,  and  mercy  would  have  ceased,  and  no 
importunity  would  avail  in  the  great  day  of  fate  and  finality,  for  the 
last  hour  of  history  would  have  struck.  A  gulf  which  none  could  cross 
would  yawn  between  even  members  of  famihes.  Danielitic  imagery 
was  more  often  resorted  to,  and  there  was  more  abandon  on  the  part 
of  Jesus  to  a  state  of  ideality.  There  was  a  note  of  ecstasy  about  the 
future  state  as  death  became  his  muse  and  his  mind  became  increas- 
ingly thanatotropic,  while  the  Kingdom  grew  transcendental  and  more 
detached  from  this  world. 

Although  he  had  fully  accepted  death  as  his  fate,  and  perhaps  as 
willed  by  the  Father,  he  would  not  have  been  human  had  he  not  felt 
toward  the  wickedness  that  had  brought  it  about  the  same  wrath  that 
in  the  Old  Testament  so  often  flamed  up  in  Yahveh  against  sin  and 
iniquity.  He  would  have  been  a  Docetic  phantom  or  dummy  of  heaven 
not  to  have  felt  his  death  an  outrage  upon  justice.  Indignation  was 
the  natural  and  inevitable  reaction  of  a  just  and  innocent  soul  against 
those  who  had  made  the  best  in  him  the  worst.  His  very  consciousness 
of  innocence  would  give  him  no  less  unique  realization  of  the  evil  which 
was  arrayed  against  him,  and  which  filled  him  with  increasing  surprise 
and  dismay  as  he  came  to  know  it.  The  ban  of  excommunication 
of  the  Church  later  pronounced  against  Spinoza  was  no  more  scathing 
and  sublime  and  almost  blood-curdling  than  his  imprecation  and  in- 
vectives against  the  scribes  and  Pharisees  in  the  third  stage.  But  here 
in  the  fourth  he  no  longer  spoke  in  propria  persona,  but  hurled  the  awful 
curse  of  God  upon  the  wicked,  chanting  the  old  prophetic  litany 
against  them.  In  three  of  the  five  judgment-day  scenes  the  Son  reigns 
in  heaven,  and  in  those  in  which  he  returns  he  does  so  for  judgment. 
There  are  signs  and  wonders  in  heaven,  and  on  earth  pestilences,  wars, 
false  Christs.  The  sun  and  moon  darken;  the  stars  fall;  heaven  and 
earth  quake.    All  nations  are  to  be  gathered  and  parted  as  sheep  and 


MESSIANITY,  SONSHIP,  AND  THE  KINGDOM  375 

goats,  and  the  sentence  upon  both  (Matt,  xxiv:  41-46)  is  based  upon 
their  treatment  of  Jesus.  But  his  greatness  of  soul  is  seen  here  in  the 
fact  that  even  the  whirlwind  of  his  indignation  is  directed  not  against 
the  immediate  agents  of  his  suffering  and  death  but  against  the  general 
depravity  that  was  the  ultimate  cause  of  all,  and  it  is  made  yet  more 
sublime  in  that  the  items  of  the  condemnation  are  so  systematically 
balanced  by  the  benedictions  and  rewards  upon  the  faithful. 

Thus  the  conception  of  genetic  stages  alone  can  bring  order  out 
of  the  otherwise  unharmonizable  utterances  relating  to  the  Kingdom. 
Without  this  temporal  perspective  they  must  remain  as  they  have  al- 
ways been,  sibylline  leaves  arrangeable  in  any  order  or  blown  about 
by  the  winds  of  doctrine.  On  this  view  everything  has  its  place  and 
also  its  perfect  natural  explanation.  Jesus  began  to  teach  it  as  a 
blessed  mystic  inner  state  easily  accessible  to  all,  just  as  he  himself  had 
attained  it,  by  intuitive  insight  and  self-consecration  by  counsels  of 
perfection.  This  state  was  the  supreme  end  of  life,  the  highest  of  all 
worths  and  values.  He  proclaimed  it  with  great  and  deliberate 
sagacity,  amply  safeguarded  against  all  political  opposition.  There 
was  no  antagonism  such  as  John's  announcement  of  it  had  aroused. 
Thus  the  first  interpretation  of  the  Kingdom  was  the  loftiest,  purest, 
best,  and  sanest.  When  he  came  to  conceive  it  later  as  a  campaign 
against  Satan's  kingdom,  as  he  did  when  he  yielded  to  the  demand  to 
become  a  healer  and  caster-out  of  devils  who  acclaimed  him  as  Mes- 
siah, his  theanthropic  consciousness  underwent  a  great  and  sudden 
augmentation  and  a  new  note  of  conflict  was  struck;  but  it  was  with 
supernal  powers  and  the  issues  suddenly  assumed  superterrestrial 
dimensions.  He  became  a  champion  and  leader  of  supermundane 
spiritual  energies  against  other  opposing  but  also  invisible  forces,  and 
this  evoked  in  Jesus'  soul  new  subconscious  energies  from  their  latent 
depths  and  gave  him  a  new  sense  of  solitariness,  and  also  a  no  less 
unique  one  of  greatness.  He  became  yet  more  an  agent  of  destiny 
and  of  God.  An  unforeseen  war  was  precipitated  which  could  be 
crowned  with  victory  only  when  Satan  and  his  crew  had  been  driven 
out,  his  innocent  victims  set  free,  and  he  bound  and  sealed  up  in  a  pit. 
Thus  Jesus  assumed  in  some  sense  a  Michael-like  function  as  a  leader 
of  the  hosts  of  God  against  those  of  the  great  enemy.  Had  he  not 
healed  or  thought  himself  recognized  as  heaven's  vicegerent  by  the 
demons  he  evicted,  these  first  motives  of  transccndentalizing  the  King- 


376  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

dom  would  have  been  lacking  and  its  enemies  would  have  been  for  the 
time  all  of  this  world.  But  the  drama  would  have  been  incomplete 
and  less  thrilling,  and  deep  unconscious  motivations  less  involved. 
If  this  would  have  given  the  Kingdom  a  fuller  and  richer  ethical  de- 
velopment, it  would  also  have  had  less  power  to  enlist  the  deeper 
energies  of  the  soul  which  are  always  objectified  as  supernatural 
powers. 

But  when  the  opposition  of  the  Jews  developed  its  strength  in  the 
third  stage,  Jesus  was  brought  face  to  face  with  one  of  the  most  sig- 
nificant alternatives  in  all  his  career.  When  it  became  plain  that  the 
Kingdom  could  not  be  established  at  Jerusalem,  he  might  have  taken 
the  great  appeal  to  the  gentile  world,  as  Paul  did  later.  This,  how- 
ever, his  intense  Judaism  made  him  unable  to  do,  and  so  his  invincible 
pertinacity  took  refuge  in  the  future  and  in  a  superior  world-order. 
The  conviction  attained  in  the  second  stage,  that  supernal  powers  were 
enlisted  and  embattled,  also  predisposed  him  to  develop  the  old 
prophetic  idea  of  a  new  dispensation  sweeping  away  the  present 
Hebrew  cult,  as  construed  by  the  scribes  and  Pharisees,  and  establish- 
ing a  new  heavenly  Jerusalem  and  temple,  and  all  this  miraculously 
and  convulsively.  His  very  diathesis  was  perfervid  and  even  fulmi- 
nating. For  him  all  that  ought  to  be  was  certain,  and  what  was  certain 
must  be  soon. 

In  fact,  it  was  the  Church  of  the  gentiles,  and  not  a  divine  visi- 
tation, that  was  destined  to  leave  the  Jewish  dispensation  desolate. 
Sublunary  and  slow  developments  were  to  work  all  the  destruction 
his  perspectiveless  mind  saw  as  immediate.  Paul  in  a  sense  only 
translated  the  changes  which  Jesus  expected  from  divine  intervention 
into  their  earthly  vicariates  and  surrogates.  The  Jews  were  rejected, 
and  not  swept  away.  The  diaspora  is  not  yet  ended,  and  in  his  day  was 
only  begun.  Not  a  spectacular  assize  but  the  verdict  of  the  Church 
composed  of  then  heathen  races  sat  in  judgment  upon  them,  and  the 
verdict  was  the  long-delayed  one  of  history.  The  drama  was  to  be. 
played  to  the  end  of  the  fifth  act  here,  and  not  transferred  at  the  end 
of  the  fourth  to  a  transcendent  realm  at  the  death  of  Jesus,  which  was 
only  the  beginning  and  did  not  mark  or  prelude  the  end  of  the  earthly 
kingdom.  Paul  interpreted  much  of  Jesus'  incoherent  and  troubled 
nightmare  dreams  into  a  practical  program,  set  it  in  scene  on  earth,  and 
not  in  cloudland,  although  he  did  not  reduce  it  all  to  immanence. 


MESSIANITY,  SONSHIP,  AND  THE  KINGDOM  377 

The  later  forms  of  Jesus'  eschatology  were,  in  psychoanalytic  terms, 
the  products  of  a  protective  mechanism  enshrining  his  great  hope 
when  it  had  become  desperate  and  seemed  to  him  incapable  of  realiza- 
tion by  even  the  best  normal  human  endeavours,  so  that  he  had  com- 
mitted its  accompHshment  back  into  God's  hands.  Paul's  appeal  was 
to  God,  too,  but  also  to  the  gentile  world.  He  would  bring  in  the 
Kingdom  through  its  means  and  not  by  the  destruction  of  Judaism,  a 
renmant  of  which  at  least  would  also  be  brought  into  it.  His  goal  and 
method  were  a  psychodynamic  equivalent  of  Jesus'  vision,  although 
human  was  to  do  more  and  divine  agency  less.  Or,  rather,  God  would 
make  more  use  of  man's  efforts  in  bringing  it  about,  and  work  was  a 
larger  supplement  of  prayer. 

The  Kingdom  is  so  many-sided  that  we  must  go  deep  to  explain  or 
understand  it,  and  also  we  must  go  back  of  the  baptism  and  of  the  be- 
ginning of  the  public  ministry  to  do  so.  The  psychogenetic  root  of 
it  all  was  that,  unknown  to  others  and  with  no  realization  of  what  was 
involved  in  it,  Jesus  had  naively  and  more  or  less  unconsciously  (as 
great  genius  works),  already  found  through  a  pure,  simple,  guileless 
life,  and  by  self-communion  and  meditation,  an  inner  way  to  the  high- 
est or  the  divine.  In  the  language  of  the  piety  of  his  day  rather  than 
in  that  of  psychology,  he  had  found  God.  He  had  yearned  to  attain 
the  maximum  of  perfection,  or,  in  Scripture  language,  he  had  hungered 
for  righteousness  with  all  his  heart.  As  other  ingenuous  youth  seek 
for  love,  fame,  greatness,  wealth,  or  power,  so  all  the  energies  of  his  soul 
were  directed  to  holiness.  In  this  quest  he  had  put  all  other  things 
aside.  It  seemed  to  him  the  sumtnum  bonum,  the  supreme  goal  of  Ufe 
and  of  all  endeavour,  something  so  precious  that  it  must  be  sought  even 
though  all  ties  of  blood  and  family  affection  had  to  be  sundered  in  the 
quest.  Not  only  had  he  striven,  but  he  had  made  the  great  Eureka 
discovery  and  attained  the  goal  he  sought.  He  had  reaUzed  that  life  is 
service.  His  own  individuality  had  been  caught  up,  inundated,  merged 
in  the  vaster  life  of  the  race  of  which  he  became  a  biophore.  This  ex- 
perience had  unlocked  new  energies  within;  had  brought  great  inner 
exaltation  and  a  new  access  of  vitality  so  great  that  even  death  could 
not  be  conceived  as  able  to  daunt  or  quell  it,  and  if  it  came  resurrection 
was  inevitable.  This  put  him  in  the  centre  of  the  current  of  creative 
evolutionary  processes.  Instinct,  reason,  conscience,  will,  could  no 
longer  collide,  but  must  reinforce  and  summate  each  other.    So 


378  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

positive  was  this  experience  that  before  it  all  negations  and  limitations 
fell  away,  and  in  place  of  repressions  there  was  a  great  expansion  of  the 
soul  which  was  now  fed  by  the  inner  mystic  bread  of  life  that  others 
knew  not  of.  It  brought  a  sense  of  ecstasy  and  raised  life  above  the 
ordinary  famihar  ranges  of  humanity.  Of  this  experience  all  miracles 
are  symbols,  and  become  true  in  a  higher  than  literal  sense  if  they 
remain  symbols.  It  brought  a  new  Sabbath  of  rest  in  the  brooding 
peace  of  God,  made  pure  oughtness  no  longer  merely  an  imperative 
but  a  passion,  and  removed  every  trace  of  heteronomy.  One  had  only 
to  awake,  arise,  hear,  see,  do.  It  may  be  described  as  dying  to  sin  or 
passing  from  death  to  life,  or  as  becoming  true  sons  of  God  with  his  will 
as  the  only  law.    It  is  also  to  be  free. 

It  was  with  some  such  inner  personal  experience  as  this  glowing 
in  his  heart  but  not  yet  exphcit  or  realized  that  Jesus,  doubtless  with 
hesitation,  came  to  John,  although  he  felt  his  standpoint  so  much 
beyond  that  of  the  Baptist  that  he  declared  that  the  least  in  the  King- 
dom was  greater  than  he.  He  had  even  then  little  sympathy  with 
John's  denunciatory  methods.  He  had  made  as  yet  no  resolution  to 
proclaim  his  experiences  or  to  seek,  save  in  a  private  personal  way,  to 
guide  others  along  the  way  he  had  found,  nor  had  he  planned  to  organ- 
ize any  movement  or  to  abandon  his  occupation.  He  did  not  yet  dream 
that  he  was  the  Messiah,  or  that  the  sonship  he  had  achieved  was 
more  than  other  zealous  seekers  might  attain  of  themselves.  But  the 
new  Kingdom  was  already  founded  in  his  own  soul,  although  in  an 
embryonic  stage,  with  parturition  just  impending,  while  John  was 
destined,  although  unwittingly  to  both,  to  be  its  midwife.  Thus  this 
interior  way  to  God  opened  in  the  quest  for  perfection  was  the  deepest 
and  most  central  thing  in  Jesus'  experience  and  in  his  teaching.  This 
is  the  key  to  unlock  all;  to  understand  it  is  at  once  the  hardest,  most 
challenging,  and  yet  the  most  imperative  problem  of  Christianity,  and 
to  reaUze  it  is  salvation.  Although  for  Jesus  it  was  virtually  a  jait 
complet  at  the  baptism,  its  progressive  realization  in  the  world  was  a 
futuristic  problem,  and  hence  what  followed  gave  the  Kingdom  a  pre- 
dominantly eschatological  character. 

Now,  since  the  way  to  the  goal  of  life  opens  from  within  the  soul, 
its  attainment  would  seem  naturally  to  be  sought  by  sohtude  and 
meditation.  Jesus  himself  often  retired  to  be  alone  and  pray,  and 
anchoritic  cults  arose  in  which  by  introversion,  visions,  vigils,  fasting, 


MESSIANITY,  SONSHIP,  AND  THE  KINGDOM  379 

and  self-castigation  of  soul  and  even  body,  man  sought  his  God.  Hence 
we  now  face  the  great  but  never  yet  adequately  explained  problem 
why  Christianity  became  a  social  religion  instead  of  sending  its  devotees 
in  isolation  into  cells  or  the  wilderness  to  save  each  his  own  soul.  This 
would  have  been  the  result  had  Jesus'  development  of  the  Kingdom 
been  completed  or  arrested  at  the  first  stage,  as  in  fact  Buddha's  cult 
was.  Jesus  had  found  his  way  out  to  the  open  sea  of  eternal  peace  and 
joy  more  inwardly  and  with  less  dramatic  incidents  of  renunciation, 
so  that  from  the  Baptism  on  he  transcended  Buddha.  How,  then,  was 
the  Kingdom  given  its  so  pronounced  social  character,  especially  as 
organization  was  not  imperative  in  view  of  the  nearness  of  the  end? 
It  was  not  enough  to  define  it  successively  over  against  Satan's  king- 
dom, the  Jewish  hierarchy  and  a  world  of  sin.  Why  must  and 
did  those  who  entered  Jesus'  Kingdom  get  and  keep  so  close  to- 
gether? Why  should  those  divinely  ruled  be  a  company  or  brother- 
hood? How  came  it  that  the  charm  of  amicitia  or  classic  friendship  so 
praised  by  ancient  moralists  before  the  development  of  romantic  love, 
who  taught  that  the  good  and  only  they  could  and  should  become  true 
friends,  was  not  only  realized  but  so  far  transcended  in  the  early 
Christian  community?  Whence  came  the  brotherly  love  that  made 
each  prefer  the  other,  the  community  of  goods,  the  symbiosis  in  which 
the  rules  of  the  higher  hfe  became  the  canticles  of  love?  The  answer 
to  this  problem  can  only  be  found  in  the  psychological  realm  of  inward 
intimate  experience  genetically  evolved.  As  Jesus  advanced  in  his 
conceptions  and  convictions  of  his  own  Messianity  and  sonship,  he 
came  to  realize  that  his  own  seeking  and  finding  had  been  unique  and 
above  and  beyond  what  was  attainable  by  others,  for  he  had  at  first 
naively  assumed  that  all  could  reach  it  as  naturally  as  he  had  done. 
Then  he  tried  to  teach  that  it  was  achieved,  to  develop  the  word  that 
should  guide  to  and  in  the  way.  But  it  could  not  all  be  set  forth  in 
precept,  for  there  were  deep  subjective  factors  in  it  that  could  not  be 
adequately  objectified.  He  called  disciples  whom  he  thought  apt, 
instructed  them,  and  sent  them  forth  on  the  first  mission  to  teach 
others,  and  thus  to  know  and  establish  themselves  the  more  firmly. 
But  the  parables  and  miracles  symbolizing  it,  effective  as  they  were, 
did  not  convey  it  all.  Having  appealed  to  the  intellect,  the  intuitions, 
and  then  to  the  will  of  his  adherents,  he  realized  that  he  must  now  go 
deeper  and  reach  the  lower  stratum  of  sentiment  and  feeling  by  an 


38o  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

appeal  such  as  had  never  before  been  made  to  the  instincts  of  personal 
loyalty,  love,  and  intuitive  identification  with  his  own  person.  His 
followers  must  feel  the  very  breathings  and  pulsations  of  his  own  soul, 
and  be  made  one  with  him  in  the  subconscious  depths  of  Hfe  by  a  subtle 
induction  of  personaKty.  Thus  he  strove  to  develop  every  trope  and 
symbol  of  consubstantiality  between  him  and  them.  In  this  endeavour 
he  naturally  had  recourse  to  the  rich  but  very  portative  thought-forms 
of  the  totemistic  cycle  of  the  ancient  folk-souP  which  even  to-day  and 
in  that  age  still  more  pervaded  life,  although  the  origin  of  these  an- 
tique moduli  of  the  psyche  was  unrecognized.  He  also  availed  him- 
self of  the  yet  more  faded  but  effective  and  recognizable  traces  of  the 
primitive  concepts  of  blood  covenant^  of  which  there  were  abundant 
renmants.  His  disciples  were  to  eat  his  flesh  and  drink  his  blood; 
they  were  members  of  his  body;  he  was  the  vine  and  they  the  branches; 
and  as  he  was  one  with  God,  they  were  one  with  him.  He  was  the 
way  through  whom  they  could  reach  God.  He  was  in  them  and  they 
in  him.  He  was  the  middleman  or  mediator  through  whom  God 
reached  man  and  was  reached  by  him.  All  his  relations  to  God  they 
must  establish  to  liim.  No  other  religious  founder  had  ever  sought  to 
thus  bind  his  disciples  to  his  own  person.  Ritschl  has  called  the 
Kingdom  not  only  bibliopaidic  and  pistobasic  but  essentially  Christo- 
centric.  Thus  Jesus  became  a  more  tangible  proxy  and  surrogate  of 
God.  It  was  thus  easier  for  his  followers  to  find  God  than  it  had  been 
for  him,  and  this  was  as  he  wished. 

From  this  it  followed  that  the  relations  of  the  disciples  to  one 
another  became  unprecedentedly  close.  They  were  members  one  of 
another  because  members  of  him.  When  he  was  gone  he  survived  as 
the  tie  that  bound  them  together,  and  the  degree  of  this  love  of  each 
for  the  others  was  also  the  degree  of  his  persistence  as  a  living  reality. 
To  love  and  serve  a  brother  was  to  love  and  serve  him;  and  this  they 
must  do  to  each  other,  even  as  to  him.  He  lived  in,  and  indeed  was, 
their  mutual  devotion.  A  union  thus  cemented  had  a  unique  strength, 
and  he  was  this  strength.  Jesus  never  dreamed  that  the  first  fellow- 
ship meal  would  become  a  permanent  sacrament  or  stereotyped  insti- 
tution, or  that  his  prayer,  which  was  intended  only  as  an  illustration  of 
the  spirit  of  prayer,  would  become  a  standard,  to  be  repeated  through 

»S,  Freud:  "Totem  nnd  Tabu."    Leipzig,  1013, 140  p. 

*Henry  Clay  Trumbull:  "Blood  Covenant."    New  York,  Sdibner's. 


MESSIANITY,  SONSHIP,  AND  THE  KINGDOM  381 

ages  ipsissimis  verbis  as  the  one  best  and  official  model  of  appeal 
to  the  Divine,  any  more  than  he  thought  that  Peter  would  become  pri- 
mate of  the  Church.  As  Bousset^  well  says,  he  drew  very  few  of  the 
logical  consequences  of  his  teaching,  for  his  perspective  of  the  future 
was  very  short.  He  did  not  realize  the  implications  of  his  doctrine, 
which  Sabatier*  is  so  fond  of  insisting  are  even  yet,  in  large  part,  un- 
realized practically  or  even  theoretically  by  his  followers.  He  never 
dreamed  of  what  F.  G.  Peabody  calls  the  "calisthenics  of  religious 
rites,"  or  the  "cold  storage  of  orthodox  opinion,"  or  a  collection  of 
specifics  or  panaceas  for  reform,  or  the  mechanisms  of  legislation  that 
would  follow.  He  was  simply  full  of  the  great  and  undefined  hope  of 
the  world  which,  as  Pott'  has  shown,  later  grew  into  the  Pauline  doc- 
trine of  faith.  The  forces  he  knew  and  dealt  with  were  those  that 
worked  from  within  outward  and  not  those  which  began  externally 
and  worked  inward.  It  can  thus  be  only  obtuseness  to  this  potent 
inner  psychic  factor  that  has  sought  to  explain  the  fraternal  bond  that 
bound  the  primitive  Christians  by  the  common  dangers  involved  in 
the  nine  persecutions,  or  as  the  cadenced  step  of  common  zeal  for 
missionary  propaganda,  nor  can  it  be  explained  as  social  cooperation 
in  quest  of  the  great  treasure,  for  all  of  these  influences  had  dispersive  as 
well  as  fraternizing  tendencies.  The  root  of  the  soHdarity  was  the 
magnetism  and  charm  of  Jesus'  own  personahty,  the  magic  of  his 
words,  the  purity  and  ingenuousness  of  his  character,  and  especially 
the  naturally  thriUing,  melting  effect  of  the  unutterable  pathos  of  his 
death  and  the  transcendent  glory  of  the  Resurrection.  These  together 
made  him  the  focus  and  cynosure  of  all  who  believed  on  him.  The 
Pauline  conception  of  a  sacrificial  ransom  or  a  hero  invoking  God's 
wrath  upon  his  own  head  to  divert  it  from  others  was  only  a  half 
figurative  objectivization,  effective  as  it  was  through  its  long  day,  of 
the  instinctive  Einfiihlung  into  the  sublimity  of  Jesus'  virtue  which 
overtopped  that  of  all  others  and  that  fused  hearts,  minds,  and  wills  into 
a  common  devotion.  Thus  he  reached  the  acme  of  leadership,  as  those 
in  his  train  did  of  hero-worship.  Death  usually  dampens  the  authority 
of  leaders,  but  it  immeasurably  exalted  his.  There  had  never  been  such 
a  soul-compeller,  such  an  authority,  such  a  master  of  those  who  strive 
to  know,  do,  and  feel  the  best  life  has  to  offer.    No  life  had  been  so 

•Bousset:  "Teachings  of  Jesui."    London,  1906.     Chapter  6,  "The  Kingdom." 

'Louis  Auguste  Sabatier:  "Doctrine  of  the  Atonement  and  Its  Historical  Evolution."    London,  igo4,  aaS  p. 

•A.  Pott:  "Das  HoSen  im  neuen  Testament."    1915,  303  p. 


382  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

ravishingly  beautiful,  and  no  one  had  even  been  thought  so  powerful, 
wise,  or  good.  And  so  he  drew  all  who  revered  him  closer  together 
than  men  had  ever  stood  before,  and  made  them  indifferent  to  all  else 
save  their  captain's  good  will.  To  become  one  of  his  favourites  was  to 
gain  all,  and  all  man's  gregarious  herding  instincts  reached  in  his  wake 
their  highest  culmination  in  and  through  him.  This  was  a  union  that 
all  outer  ties  can  only  typify  or  vicariate  for. 

Recent  anthropological  studies  teach  us  that  the  primitive  self 
was  not  the  individual  but  the  group,  and  that  the  former  emerged  very 
gradually  out  of  the  latter.  Primitives  knew  no  barriers  between  one 
another,  or  even  between  themselves  and  nature.  The  ego  could  change 
into  the  alter.  There  was  not  only  contagion  of  qualities  but  meta- 
morphosis of  character.  This  was  peculiarly  the  case  among  members 
of  the  same  totem  clan.  Within  these  self  may  be  acquired,  lost,  or 
changed  with  increased  facility.  In  the  closest  social  groups  members 
were  so  knit  the  one  to  the  other  that  if  one  suffered  all  did.  If  one 
sinned  all  did,  and  any  other  member  might  be  punished  as  in  blood 
revenge.  Possession  and  regeneration  involved  acquiring  another  soul. 
Virtue  could  be  transferred  by  a  touch  or  magically.  All  this  con- 
course, exchange,  fusion,  or  circulation  of  soul  or  self  was  mediated  by 
some  Mana-like  principle  which  underlay  all  conditions  and  was  the 
medium  of  such  changes.  Now  the  Kingdom  was  a  spiritual  and  re- 
stricted totem  group  in  which  each  was,  had,  did  nothing  for  himself 
alone,  but  lived,  moved,  thought,  felt,  acted,  and  had  his  being  in  the 
whole.  Those  who  came  into  the  Kingdom  thereby  changed  their 
souls.  Peter  and  Paul  even  changed  their  names.  The  exalted  Christ 
was  thus  their  totem  head.  He  was  born  or  formed  anew  in  each,  and 
each  was  reborn  into  him.  Thus  the  primitive  Kingdom  was  founded. 
It  was  invisible  and  not  made  with  hands,  long  before  it  grew  into  the 
visible  Church.  Out  of  this  fusion  of  individual  souls  all  the  institu- 
tions, doctrines,  ordinances,  offices,  buildings,  rites  of  the  Church,  later 
evolved.  All  these,  however,  belong  to  a  third  stage  of  the  develop- 
ment of  the  Kingdom  which  Jesus  never  knew  or  presaged.  He  had 
experienced  in  his  own  person  the  first  stage  in  the  genesis  of  the  King- 
dom before  his  ministry  began.  It  embraced  the  second  stage  of 
organizing  those  who  had  found  salvation  by  knitting  their  souls  up 
indiscerptibly  with  his  own  person  and  through  it  with  one  another. 
The  third  stage,  begun  by  Peter  and  Paul  after  Jesus'  death,  is  not  yet 


MESSIANITY,  SONSHIP,  AND  THE  KINGDOM  383 

ended.  We  must  not  disparage  totemism  as  a  principle  for  all  that 
rises  high  strikes  its  roots  deep  into  the  past.  As  a  system  it  has  long 
since  ceased  to  exist  in  the  consciousness  of  cultured  races,  and  there 
were  some  but  faint  ostensive  traces  of  it  among  the  Jews  in  Jesus'  day. 
But  it  is  still  potent  beneath  the  threshold  of  the  human  soul  in  its 
instinctive  autistic  nature  and  depths,  and  when  we  feel  the  closest  of 
all  human  ties  we  turn  not  merely  in  poetry  but  in  prose  to  its  terms, 
for  it  was  the  mediator  of  the  most  intimate  fraternization  through 
countless  ages.  Indeed  it  so  long  represented  the  closest  of  all  rela- 
tions between  men,  and  was  so  long  the  hieroglyph  of  the  culmination 
of  man's  gregarious  instincts,  that  although  now  obsolete  and  absurd 
as  a  system,  it  still  lives  deep  in  the  heart,  and  its  vestiges  and  scattered 
phrases  in  the  Fourth  Gospel  are  still  valid  and  work  their  magic  in  us. 
Could  we  see  more  clearly  into  the  subconscious  psyche,  we  should 
realize  that  the  old  metamorphoses  of  personality  and  reidentification 
with  a  sovereign  Lord  of  the  higher  life  and  mind  of  man  are  still  very 
active  processes  within  us. 

All  Jesus'  moral  and  social  teachings  followed  naturally  from  two 
major  premises:  first,  the  end  is  at  hand,  and  second,  there  must  be  a 
general  merger  of  the  individual  in  the  whole  in  which  the  partnership 
is  unlimited  and  without  reservation.  From  these  data  it  is  plain  how 
little  respect  there  could  be  for  differences  of  station,  and  how  Jesus 
must  have  abhorred  over-individuation  and  all  that  favoured  it,  such 
as  power,  fame,  pleasure,  and  wealth.  Let  us  select  the  latter  as  typical 
and  see  how  severely  conditioned  his  views  were  upon  the  two  above 
premises,  and  therefore  how  fatuous  it  is  to  attempt  to  apply  this  typi- 
cal line  of  his  social  teachings  to  modern  conditions.  To  do  so  we 
should  have  to  revert  to  a  totemic  community  and  be  convinced  that 
mundane  affairs  were  about  to  end.  Hence  Jesus'  teaching  here  as 
elsewhere  was  ad  interim}  In  this  very  close  and  temporary  fraternity 
no  man  must  call  anything  his  own.  There  must  be  a  communistic 
sharing  of  all  with  all.  No  one  was  worthy  who  loved  anything  or 
anybody  more  than  him.  The  rich  young  man  was  a  paragon  of  every 
virtue,  but  his  wealth  barred  him  from  the  Kingdom,  which  was  as  hard 
to  enter  as  a  needle's  eye.  The  land  was  rich,  the  people  industrious, 
but  most  were  in  bitter  poverty  by  reason  of  extortion.    Jesus  was 

_>See  G.  D.  Huever:  "The  Teachings  of  Jesus  Concerning  Wealth."  Chicago,  1903.  C.  Rugge:  "Der  erdischer 
Besitz  im  neuen  Testament."  Also  Edersheim:  "Sketches  of  Jewish  Social  Life  in  the  Days  of  Christ."  London,  1876, 
343  p.     Marquand:  "StaatsverwaltuDg."    Here  Peabody  is  best. 


384  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

reared  in  poverty,  his  disciples  were  poor,  and  all  were  below  the  middle 
class,  which  Aristotle  thought  the  most  favourable.  On  entering  his 
ministry  Jesus  and  his  followers  had  left  behind  their  means  of  suste- 
nance, and  they  seem  to  have  known  hunger,  cold,  scantiness  of  attire, 
and  homelessness.  When  the  disciples  were  sent  forth  to  preach,  they 
were  forbidden  to  take  any  provision  for  their  own  maintenance,  but 
must  trust  solely  to  spontaneous  hospitaUty  and  must  withdraw  if  this 
was  not  offered.  Thus  it  is  not  strange  that  poverty  became  almost  a 
muse  to  be  wooed,  that  it  was  a  test  of  admission  to  the  Kingdom. 
Against  the  hell  of  want  their  only  safeguard  was  faith  in  a  heavenly 
provider,  and  they  must  make  this  the  psychic  equivalent  of  a  modest 
Hfe  endowment.  Their  wants,  too,  must  be  reduced  to  a  minimum,  nor 
was  this  thought  treason  to  the  agencies  of  industrial  production.  No 
one  can  serve  God  and  Mammon.  From  the  parable  of  Dives  and 
Lazarus  we  are  left  to  infer  that  the  former  went  to  hell  solely  because 
he  was  rich,  and  the  latter  to  heaven  merely  because  he  was  poor. 
The  Gospel  was  first  proclaimed  to  the  poor,  and  they  seem  to  have 
been  saved  first  and  easiest.  Nitti  thinks  poverty  was  an  explicit  and 
inexorable  condition  of  membership  in  the  Kingdom,  and  Leslie 
Stephens  thinks  the  early  Christians  were  almost  nihilists  in  their 
rancour  against  property.  Luke,  whom  Rugge  calls  the  socialistic 
Evangelist,  teaches  that  none  who  did  not  renounce  all  could  become 
disciples.  He  alone  records  of  the  woes  upon  the  rich,  the  parable  of  the 
rich  man  who  boasted  and  was  condemned  for  it;  the  lost  penny;  the 
unjust  steward;  the  good  Samaritan.  He  says  the  blessing  is  for  the 
hungry,  which  Matthew  records  for  those  hungry  for  righteousness 
rather  than  for  the  poor  in  spirit.  Luke  makes  Jesus  say,  "Give  to 
every  one,"  instead  of  "  to  him  that  asketh. "  He  records  the  marriage 
feast  to  which  the  poor  and  defective  were  bidden.  The  Gospel  in- 
junction is  if  one  asks  a  coat  to  give  a  cloak  also.  "  Sell  what  thou  hast 
and  give  alms."  All  must  give,  even  the  widow  her  mite.  Those  who 
give  to  the  poor  give  or  loan  to  the  Lord,  lay  up  treasure  in  heaven,  etc. 
Renan  regards  the  Gospels  as  essentially  Ebionistic  and  pervaded  by 
the  view  that  none  but  the  poor  could  be  saved.  Many  if  not  most 
of  the  commands  to  give  could  not  have  been  addressed  to  the  esoteric 
circle,  for  those  who  had  abandoned  all  would  have  nothing  left  to  give, 
but  were  themselves  the  fittest  to  receive  charity.  Jesus'  own  main- 
tenance and  that  of  his  disciples  and  his  cause  depended  on  the  virtue 


MESSIANITY,  SONSHIP,  AND  THE  KINGDOM  385 

of  benevolence  which  was  so  stressed,  ahhough  we  need  not  infer,  as  has 
often  been  done  by  critics,  that  he  had  a  subtle  and  selfish  though  un- 
conscious motive  in  magnifying  this  virtue  to  the  uttermost.  Paul 
said  the  Lord  loved  a  cheerful  giver,  and  believed  in  giving  as  freely 
as  we  have  received.  Pity,  compassion,  almsgiving,  are  perhaps  best 
developed  in  Buddhistic  lands  like  Burma,  but  Christianity  sublimates 
charitas  into  generosity  of  thinking  and  feeling,  which  is  something  far 
above  benevolence  as  a  business,  a  virtue,  or  a  science,  all  of  which  it 
now  is.  This  involves  the  wise  direction  of  sympathy,  prefers  a  personal 
touch  to  the  anonymity  of  a  subscription  paper,  accepts  datours  and 
doles,  even  of  ill-gotten  wealth.^  It  seems  as  if  Jesus'  rancour  toward 
the  rich  grew  during  his  ministry.  In  the  Old  Testament  property  is 
a  sign  of  Jehovah's  favour,  but  in  the  New  Testament  woe  is  pronounced 
upon  the  rich  as  such.  As  Ruskin  says,  wealth  is  now  illth.  Fine 
raiment,  sumptuous  fare,  houses,  land,  property,  barns  bursting  with 
the  harvest,  all  are  deceitful,  snares.  Holtzmann  says  Jesus  thought 
them  perilous,  Luke  that  he  deemed  them  disgraceful.  They  choke 
the  word.  Love  of  money  is  the  root  of  all  kinds  of  evil.  James  calls 
on  the  rich  to  "weep  and  howl."  Naumann  calls  Jesus  an  enemy  of 
wealth  and  capital.  Laveleye^  says  that  if  Christianity  was  taught 
according  to  Jesus'  spirit,  "the  existing  social  order  could  not  last  a 
day."  Herron  says,  "Jesus  regarded  industrial  wealth  as  a  moral  fall 
and  a  social  violence." 

In  view  of  the  above  it  is  disheartening  to  contemplate  the  vast 
body  of  literature  which  has  accumulated  since  the  great  advance  in 
industrialism  and  the  coincident  efforts  of  the  Semitic  writers,  Marx 
and  Lasalle,  to  make  a  radical  speculative  socialism  a  substitute  for 
Christianity.  Bebel,  Bax,  and  Liebknecht  teach  revolt  from  the 
Church,  which  they  hold  has  come  to  stand  for  private  wealth,  the 
worst  of  all  monopoHes.  Hence  God  and  "the  semi-mythical  Syrian 
of  the  first  century"  must  be  abohshed,  and  the  world  reorganized 
without  rehgion  in  a  social  democracy.    Against  this  alienation  of 


»W.  Rauschenbusch:  "Christianizing  the  Social  Order."  New  York,  igi2,  493  p.  Also  his  "Christianity  and  the 
Social  Crisis."  New  York,  1908,  429  p.  F.  G.  Peabody:  "Jesus  Christ  and  the  Social  Question."  New  York,  191a, 
374  p.  Also  his  "The  Approach  to  the  Social  Question."  New  York,  1909,  210  p.  W.  E.  Chadwick :  "  Social  Relation- 
ships in  the  Light  of  Christianity."  London,  igio,  344  p.  R.  J.  Campbell:  "Christianity  and  the  Social  Order." 
London,  1907,  284  p.  H.  F.  Ward,  ed.:  "Social  Ministry."  New  York,  1910,  318  p.  C.  R.  Henderson:  "Social  Du- 
ties from  the  Christian  Point  of  View."  Chicago,  1909,  332  p.  S.  N.  Patten:  "Social  Basis  of  Religion."  New  York, 
1911,  247  p.  J.  H.  Holmes:  "The  Revolutionary  Function  of  the  Modem  Church."  New  York,  1912,  264  p.  G. 
Harris:  "A  Century  of  Change  in  Religion."  Boston,  1914,  266  p.  F..R.  M.  Hitchcock:  "St.  Augustine's  Treatise  on 
the  City  of  God."  Trans.,  London,  1900,  iis  p.  P.  A.  Kropotkin:  "Mutual  Aid  as  a  Factor  of  Evolution."  London 
1902,  348  p. 

'"  PrimiUve  Property."    Introd.    Trans.  London,  1878. 


386  JESUS   IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

industry  from  the  Church  arose  a  long  series  of  efforts  from  Wichern 
and  his  ''inner  mission  "  in  1849  to  Von  Kettelcr,  De  Mun,  and  Du  Prey 
in  the  CathoHc  Church  and  Maurice  and  Kingsley  in  England,  who 
sought  to  humanize  economic  principles  and  methods  and  to  put  co- 
operation in  place  of  competition.  Thus  we  have  two  socialisms,  one 
Christian  and  the  other  anti- Christian.  IMeanwhile  a  great  effort  has 
been  spent  in  minimizing  and  explaining  away  Jesus'  sayings  concern- 
ing wealth,  as  if  it  were  necessary  to  apologize  to  him  for  the  wealth 
both  of  and  in  the  Church.  We  are  reminded  that  he  was  a  friend  of 
the  rich  publican  Zaccheus;  that  he  taught  the  increase  of  each  man's 
talent;  said  that  to  him  that  hath  wiU  be  given.  We  are  told  that  a 
Christian  may  be  rich  if  he  masters  and  is  not  mastered  by  wealth; 
that  Jesus  said  nothing  against  trusts;  that  property  begins  in  the 
animal  world,  etc.  Why  not  frankly  admit  that  it  is  as  preposterous 
to  go  to  Jesus  for  economic  as  it  would  be  for  scientific  msdom? 
Everything  indicates  that  his  views  of  property  and  industry  were 
hardly  less  crude  and  negligible  than  those  he  held  concerning  astron- 
omy. In  this  domain  he  was  more  ignorant  than  the  crudest 
modern  tyro  and  most  of  his  sayings  should  be  left  to  the  ob- 
livion they  deserve.  Wliat  he  said  and  his  followers  practised  was 
due  to  conditions  hardly  less  exceptional  and  transient  than  the  en- 
forced rules  laid  down  on  a  doomed  ship.  What  could  he  know  of  the 
new  worths  and  values  wealth  creates,  absorbed  as  he  was  with  the 
idea  of  merging  the  individual  in  the  group,  and  in  eradicating  selfish- 
ness in  all  its  forms  during  the  brief  time  that  remained?  Of  course  he 
v/ould  have  abominated  modern  predatory  wealth;  but  he  was  no 
socialistic  communist  or  anarchist  in  any  modern  sense.  In  wise 
discrimination,  present-day  teachings  and  even  the  best  of  the  ancient 
moralists  are  better  guides  than  Jesus.  Were  we  to  take  his  precepts 
in  this  field  literally  and  apply  them,  modern  society  would  be  reduced 
to  the  level  of  the  totemic  clan,  living  for  the  day,  improvident  and 
absorbed  in  dreams  of  a  new  paradise  supernaturally  inaugurated. 
Jesus  foresaw  neither  the  Church,  science,  modern  industrialism,  law, 
courts,  nor  medicine,  and  had  no  conception  of  statecraft.  But  he  did 
see,  as  no  one  before  or  since  has  seen,  the  principle  of  service  and 
mutuality,  which  is  the  psychogenetic  basis  of  true  success  in  all 
these  domains.  Although  we  must  forget  and  often  negate  his 
specific  teachings,  we  can  and  must   find   for  ourselves  ways   and 


MESSIANITY,  SONSHIP,  AND  THE  KINGDOM  387 

means  of  applying  his  spirit  in  all  these  fields;  and  thus  only  can 
we  make  all  of  them  truly  Christian.  To  him  we  owe  simply  the 
crude  but  inspiring  ideal  and  impulsion.  The  work  must  be  all  our 
own. 

The  early  Church  groped  its  way  to  two  expressions  of  the  ultimate 
relations  of  the  ideal  man  to  the  race  and  to  the  cosmos  back  of  it, 
which  are  expressed  respectively  in  the  doctrine  of  incarnation  and 
that  of  the  parousia.  The  first  means  in  modern  terms  that  not  merely 
in  Hegelian  sense  does  God  come  to  consciousness  in  the  ideal  man;  for 
the  theanthropic  state  of  the  soul  must  forever  transcend  the  conscious- 
ness of  any  indi\ddual,  and  personality  itself  necessarily  involves 
limitations.  It  means,  rather,  that  the  type-man  whose  life  is  impelled 
by  the  maximum  momentum  at  the  centre  of  the  evolutionary  stream, 
feels,  thinks,  and  acts  as  normally,  and  especially  as  generically,  as 
is  possible  for  a  single  human  individual.  In  so  doing  he  incarnates 
what  Hegel  called  the  pure  idea,  Fichte  the  absolute  ego,  Schopenhauer 
the  will  to  Hve,  Spencer  the  developmental  nisus,  Bergson  the  creative 
elan  vital,  Freud  and  Jung  the  primordial  libido,  Janet  the  impulse  to 
perfection,  or  wholeness  (which  is  hohness),  Adler  the  horror  of  medioc- 
rity or  inferiority  in  the  impulse  to  attain  Geltung,  etc.  This  is  the 
prime  impulse  of  life  and  heredity,  which  pleasure  normally  advances 
and  pain  and  disease  tend  to  inhibit,  the  arrests  of  which  make  what 
we  call  consciousness,  which  is  always  remedial,  causes  all  neuroses 
and  psychoses,  and  brings  death  sooner  or  later  to  all.  This  great 
impulse  toward  more  intense  larger  human  hfe  the  soul  responds  to 
even  in  its  aberrations.  Most  that  constitutes  life  slumbers  in  us 
from  birth  to  death  because  the  vaster  life  of  the  race  lies  so  largely 
below  the  threshold  of  consciousness  and  rarely  breaks  through  the 
barriers  that  bar  the  phyletic  from  the  ontogenetic  hfe.  This  means 
heredity,  which  is  well  called  from  God,  for  every  formulation  of  the 
background  of  existence,  whether  it  stops  at  the  human  stage  or  goes 
back  to  the  ulterior  source  of  Hfe  in  general  or  still  further  back  to  the 
great  autos  we  call  the  cosmos  or  to  the  pantheistic  mother  lye,  being, 
cosmic  gas,  protyle,  or  whatever  its  name — these  are  what  man  has 
always  called  divine.  Recession  or  reversion  toward  this,  whether  it 
be  back  to  a  prime  principle  underlying  the  universe  or  to  some  proxi- 
mate stage  of  development,  is  recession,  or  religion  in  the  best  ety- 
mological sense  of  that  word,  because  it  revives  or  releases  genetic 


388  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

impulsions.    Of  this  the  old  word,  "incarnation,"  is  a  still  adequate 
and  pregnant  symbol. 

The  "second  coming"  is  less  psychogenetic  than  moral  for  it 
expresses  the  ineluctable  conviction  that  sometime,  somewhere,  virtue 
and  happiness  on  the  one  hand  and  sin  and  misery  on  the  other  will  get 
together,  as  they  should,  as  justice  demands.  This  conviction  Kant 
thought  created  and  kept  alive  the  belief  in  a  transcendent  world. 
Thus  every  drama  and  novel  which  in  the  end  metes  out  desert  justly 
is  a  petty  parousia  and  keeps  alive  the  selfsame  instinct  which  found 
expression  in  this  doctrine.  It  is  one  of  the  chief  glories  of  Jesus  that 
this  eschatological  denouement  was  believed  in  so  fervently  by  him  that 
he  felt  impelled  to  find  relief  for  the  inner  tension  of  his  soul  about 
it  by  having  recourse  to  even  the  wild  weird  tropes  and  metaphors  of 
Daniel  and  the  apocryphal  imagery,  and  that  to  him  it  seemed  as  real 
as  it  did  to  the  author  of  the  Book  of  Enoch.  The  awful  apparition 
of  justice  in  a  filial  day  of  judgment  haunted  this  most  fervently 
ethical  of  all  the  souls  in  history.  Fiat  jiistitia,  mat  ccelum  et  terra. 
Then  only  can  the  Kingdom  come.  Jesus'  soul  was  so  surcharged  with 
the  flush  of  creative  evolution  that  it  was  like  a  battery  with  such  a 
voltage  of  electric  tension  that  discharge  was  inevitable,  defective  as 
were  the  conductors,  so  that  its  heat  and  light  can  still  be  felt  in  the 
fantastic  dreameries  about  the  catastrophic  advent  of  heaven  to  reward 
the  good  and  of  hell  to  punish  the  bad.  To  the  passionate  moralist 
earth  needs  nothing  so  much  or  so  immediately  as  a  judge  who  is  wise 
enough  to  perceive  desert,  and  powerful  enough  to  mete  out  to  all 
according  to  their  merits.  The  agonizing  cry  of  his  soul  is,  "Why 
does  the  day  of  justice  not  come!"  Belief  that  it  impends  effects  the 
most  thorough  of  all  purgations  of  soul.  All  who  deem  this  a  moral 
universe  hold  that  biological  laws  or  the  perhaps  yet  slower  course  of 
history  will  sometime  vindicate  justice,  even  though  it  require  ages  of 
natural  selection  acting  on  individuals,  families,  and  nations  to  do  it. 
But  in  Jesus'  temperament  the  processes  of  this  conviction  found  a 
short-circuit,  and  the  detonation  was  sudden,  here,  and  now.  All  fu- 
ture history  lost  perspective  as  temporal  remoteness  was  foreshortened 
into  the  present.  Thus  the  parousia  is  anticipation  by  the  same  psychic 
mechanism  that  evolution  is  revelation.  As  in  the  Incarnation  we 
command  the  resources  of  the  past  of  the  race  and  the  world,  so  in  the 
parousia  Jesus  strove  to  teach  us  to  command  the  resources  of  the 


MESSIANITY,  SONSHIP,  AND  THE  KINGDOM  389 

future  by  vividly  presentifying  the  far-off  results  and  issues  of  human 
destiny.^ 

Thus  the  parotisia-idea.  is  to  us  a  kind  of  parable  made,  not  hke 
other  parables,  consciously,  but  by  Jesus'  autistic  nature.  To  fully 
understand  it  we  must  get  back  of  what  he  said  about  it  to  what  he 
meant  by  this  highly  symbolic  complex.  We  err  if  we  try  to  accept 
it  hterally,  even  though  he  probably  meant  to  be  thus  understood. 
Here  we  have  a  motif  which  we  must  interpret.  Theology  has  piously 
conserved  but  failed  to  understand  it.  Romance,  as  we  saw  in  Chapter 
2,  has  often,  although  very  feebly,  tried  to  bring  Jesus  or  some  figure 
representing  him  into  modern  life  in  a  way  to  make  his  moral  power 
felt  by  those  who  came  in  contact  with  him.  The  range  of  this  prin- 
ciple far  transcends  these  puny  efforts,  but  it  should  be  a  most  inspiring 
incentive  to  the  creative  imagination. 

Kenosis  is  another  pregnant  theme  for  religious  psychology.  All 
the  Yahveh  of  Isaiah  and  the  major  prophets  did  not  find  embodiment 
in  Jesus,  for  the  former  was  too  vast  for  all  the  plenitude  of  his  attri- 
butes, infinity  in  time  and  space,  creativeness,  omnipotence,  to  be 
manifested  in  any  single  son  of  man.  Nor  is  it  all  a  matter  of  logical 
extension  versus  intention;  nor  is  it  the  case  of  a  generalized  type-form 
of  animal  like  the  patrojelis,  with  more  generic  and  less  specific  types 
than  any  of  the  species  that  sprang  from  it ;  nor  is  it  exactly  illustrated 
by  the  processional  of  growth  of  an  adult  out  of  Wordsworthian  child- 
hood, who,  as  he  develops,  loses  many  of  the  traits  of  the  genus  in 
acquiring  those  of  the  individual.  These  are  only  analogues  of  ken- 
osis. The  great  achievement  wrought  by  Christianity  of  casting  man's 
ideas  of  the  divine  into  a  specific,  unipersonal,  human  form  did,  but 
should  not,  make  us  forget  the  greater  God  of  all  nature,  animate  and 
inanimate.  It  is  excessive  anthropomorphization  of  religion  that  has 
caused  its  tragic  age-long  warfare  with  science.  The  substance  of  the 
Godhood  that  did  not  and  could  not  all  go  over  into  Jesus  the  Christ 
is  still  worthy  of  adoration  and  service.     This  overplus  was  the  Deity 

'In  his  very  ingenious  and  stimulating  "The  Master  of  Modem  Evolution"  (ipii,  13s  p.)  G.  H.  MacNish  represents 
heredity  and  adaptation  as  the  two  chief  factors  of  life,  illustrating  how  now  one  and  now  the  other  dominates  in  history 
and  in  individuals.  One  is  racial,  and  the  other  individual.  The  first  makes  for  conservatism,  is  favoured  by  aristocracies 
and  pride  of  birth,  is  cultivated  by  meditation,  by  which  the  individual  may  break  through  the  "screen"  of  William 
James,  and  is  illustrated  in  the  conservatism  of  the  Catholic  Church  and  in  stable  states  and  societies  generally.  The 
other  is  marked  by  an  overplus  of  the  individual  element  that  innovates  reforms,  brings  in  the  new,  etc.  Jesus  he  con- 
ceives as  marking  the  climax  of  evolution,  bringing  in  not  only  a  new  but  a  higher  degree  of  life;  conserving  yet  revising 
the  old  in  the  light  of  the  new;  controlling  nature  and  man,  yet  no  less  a  paragon  of  adiustment.  He  desired  all  to 
become  children  in  the  sense  of  going  back  to  the  old  unity  with  self  and  kind,  chose  for  his  cabinet  discioles  of  the  most 
opposite  traits,  and  harmonized  them.  He  kept  the  "screen"  open  so  that  he  could  command  all  the  latent  resources 
of  his  soul  and  that  of  the  race  and  the  world  to  which  he  ever  harked  back,  and  which  he  could  summon  at  will.  He 
was  a  master  at  adjusting  antagonistic  forces.  Because  it  was  inner,  the  union  that  he  brought  into  the  world  was 
wider,  closer,  and  more  lasting  than  the  empires  of  force  set  up  by  Caesar  and  Alexander. 


390  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

that  Jesus  himself  adored.  Indeed,  it  is  only  the  pathetic  Enge  des 
Bewusstseins  on  our  part  that  makes  us  think  that  to  be  truly  Christian 
we  should  know  and  serve  Jesus  only.  It  needs  no  very  profound  psy- 
choanalysis to  show  that  the  most  devout  of  all  Jesus'  disciples  from 
the  beginning  to  our  day  make  him  the  chief  but  never  the  only  divin- 
ity that  they  worship.  The  germs  of  all  the  old  faiths  still  live  in  us 
all,  and  alas  for  Christianity  if  they  were  not  there !  We  might  as  well 
try  to  extirpate  the  scores  of  rudimentary  organs  in  our  body  as  to 
eliminate  these.  We  must  not  only  revere  the  Most  High  of  the 
Psalms  and  Prophets,  but  what  large  and  true  Christian  heart  does  not 
warm  to  the  pantheistic  sentiment  of  the  great  poets  and  philosophers 
and  feel  the  lure  of  the  best  that  is  in  all  the  great  ethnic  Bibles?  Other- 
wise why  do  or  can  we  study  comparative  religions?  Children  in  their 
plays  and  toys,  and  adults  in  the  charms  and  ornaments  they  wear, 
are  fetish-worshippers,  and  under  stress  of  feeling  we  all  become  primi- 
tive animists.  Thus  there  has  never  been  a  complete  kenosis  of  any 
of  the  antique  or  transcended  faiths  and  cults  into  Christianity.  The 
aesthetic  feelings  still  worship  the  blue  vault  above,  the  heavenly 
bodies,  clouds,  rain,  lightning,  wind,  water,  fire,  trees,  flowers,  and 
animals.  Each  of  these  has  at  some  time  or  place  long  been  the  very 
highest  object  of  the  religious  instincts,  and  alas  for  us  if  these  vestiges 
are  rooted  out  from  our  souls !  We  have  thought  too  meanly  of  Man- 
soul.  It  has  many  mansions,  and  it  is  enough  if  we  keep  the  best  of 
these  sacred  to  the  God  of  our  Scriptures.  Only  in  the  cruder  past  did 
the  new  God  evict,  diabolize,  or  slay  his  predecessor.  No  man  can 
be  Christian  in  the  sense  too  usually  required  with  more  than  a  safe 
working  majority  of  his  faculties.  In  his  attitude  of  filial  piety  toward 
Yahveh  and  the  Hebrew  cult  Jesus  gave  the  world  the  truest  and 
loftiest  paradigm  of  how  a  new  should  succeed  an  old  religion;  and  this 
suggests  that  the  true  missionary  should  be  chiefly  intent  upon  reveal- 
ing the  new  that  lies  concealed  in  the  old  religion,  but  which  he  is  to 
minister  to  just  as  Jesus  did,  and  as  only  a  very  few  of  the  great  CathoHc 
missionaries  have  ever  attempted.^  Perhaps  no  one  now  living  wor- 
ships Zeus,  once  supreme  father  of  gods  and  men,  yet  the  study  of  this 
cult  enriches  the  religious  life  of  every  classicist.  Thus  no  kenosis  ever 
was  or  can  be  complete.  Modern  pragmatism  has  not  rightly  observed 
the  principle  of  kenosis  with  reference  to  the  older  metaphysics  and  the 

•See  "Missionary  Pedagogy"  in  my  "Educational  Problems."     1911,  vol.  a,  chapter  lo. 


MESSIANITY,  SONSHIP,  AND  THE  KINGDOM  391 

philosophy  of  the  absolute  which  it  would  supersede.  Every  teacher 
of  the  history  of  philosophy  may  have  his  own  preferences,  and  even 
his  own  system;  but  if  the  latter  interferes  with  his  sympathy  mth  any 
one  of  all  the  serious  efforts  from  Thales  to  Bergson  that  men  have 
made  to  comprehend  the  universe,  he  ceases  to  be  a  worthy  or  even 
efficient  representative  of  his  own  standpoint.  Indeed,  Christianity 
from  the  very  first  has  been  a  masterpiece  of  syncretism,  and  owes  its 
marvellous  spread  largely  to  the  fact  that  it  has  given  back  to  all  men 
a  revised  and  enriched  version  of  what  they  all  had.  No  old  rehgion 
that  went  over  to  it  did  so  wholly.  Converts  who  ostentatiously  and 
enthusiastically  burned  their  idols  in  so  doing  still  continued  to  invest 
the  new  faith  with  the  old  rehgious  feeHngs  transferred  to  new  objects, 
for  nothing  is  so  transferable  as  affectivity.* 


«I  have  found  help  in  this  chapter  by  following  among  others,  Robert  Law:  "The  Emotions  of  Jesus."  T.  &  T. 
Clark,  28s  p.  A.  Schlatter:  "Die  christliche  Ethik."  Calw.  u.  Stuttgart,  1914,  386  p.  G.  S.  Painter:  "The  Philosophy 
of  Christ's  Temptation."  Boston,  igi4,  333  p.  Dn.  Volter:  "Jesus  der  Menschensohn  oder  Das  Berufsbewusstsein 
Jesu."  Strassburg,  1914,  113  p.  Konst.  Gutberlet:  "Der  Gottmensch  Jesus  Christus;  eine  Begrundung  und  Apologie 
der  kirchlichen  Christologie."  Regensburg,  1913,  325  p.  E.  D.  La  Touche:  "The  Person  of  Christ  in  Modern 
Thought."  London,  1912,  416  p.  E.  H.  Merrill:  "Person  of  Christ."  Bibliotheca  Sacra  Co.,  1910.  J.  W.  Berg: 
"Das  Leben  und  Leiden  Jesu  Christi."  Caspar,  igis-  S.  C.  Tapp:  "Why  Jesus  Was  a  Man  and  Not  a  Woman."  1914. 
Sidney  C.  Tapp,  406  Reliance  Bldg.,  Kansas  City,  Mo.  W.  J.  Lhamon:  "Character  Christ."  Revell,  1914.  E.  W. 
Serl:  "Laughter  of  Jesus."  Neale,  1911.  E.  D.  Wright:  "Psychology  of  Christ."  Cochrane  Pub.,  1909.  A.  Whyte: 
"Our  Lord's  Character."  Revell.  C.  H.  Barrows:  "Personality  of  Jesus."  Hougnton,  1906.  J.  Smith:  "Magnetism 
of  Christ."  Doran.  C.  E.  Jefferson:  "Character  of  Jesus."  Crowell,  1908.  T.  Hughes:  "Manliness  of  Christ." 
Altemus.  H.  Bushnell:  "Character  of  Jesus."  Scribner.  P.  Schaff:  "Person  of  Christ."  Am.  Tract,  1913.  Fried- 
rich  Daab:  "Jesus  von  Nazaret."  Diisseldorf,  Langewiesche,  1907,  224  p.  Karl  Weidel:  "Jesu  Personlichkeit;  eine 
psychologische  Studie."  Halle,  Marhold,  1908,  47  p.  Johannes  Ninck:  "Jesus  als  Charakter;  eine  Untersuchung." 
3d  rev.  ed.  Leipzig,  Hinrichs,  1910,  396  p. 


CHAPTER  SEVEN 

JESDS'  ESCHATOLOGY,  HIS  INNER  CHARACTER,  PURPOSE  AND  WORK 

The  founders  of  the  eschatological  view^Relations  of  psychology 
to  Christology — Jesus'  diathesis,  which  was  essentially  ecstatic — Jesus' 
great  change  of  plan  and  the  causes  of  the  "quest  for  death" — Contact 
with  the  great  ethnic  religions  of  death  and  resurrection  of  divine 
personages  based  on  seasonal  changes — Jesus'  "passion  for  secrecy" — 
The  pathos  of  his  death  found  in  the  fact  that  he  believed  this  second 
plan  a  failure  and  that  there  was  to  be  no  sequel — In  what  sense  did 
Jesus  rise  and  return? — ^His  futurism — The  reinforcements  of  the  moral 
sense  by  the  expectation  of  an  end  of  the  world — ^The  psychology  of 
death — ^In  what  sense  was  Jesus  great? — (A)  The  standard  of  being 
discussed — (B)  That  of  experiencing  both  extremes  of  pleasure  and 
pain — (C)  Alternations  between  the  subjective  and  objective  Hfe  or 
between  solitude  and  society — (D)  Behef  of  being  influenced  by  some 
power  above  self — (E)  That  they  are  generic  type  or  totemic  men — 
(F)  Combining  pairs  of  opposites  like  conservative  and  progressive, 
calmness  and  enthusiasm,  imagination  and  common  sense — ^Necessity 
of  new  and  higher  conceptions  of  Jesus  if  his  power  is  to  be  maintained 
in  the  world — (i)  He  felt  superior  to  others  and  closer  than  any  one 
else  had  been  to  God — (2)  He  concealed  this  dominant  sense  of  inner 
deity — (3)  This  brought  the  higher  tension  of  opposites  in  his  soul — 
Such  a  being  must  necessarily  move  far  up  and  down  the  algedonic 
scale,  and  love  and  hate  more  than  others — ^The  psychology  of  inspira- 
tion— Jesus'  death  brought  followers  at  first  no  glimmer  of  insight  into 
what  he  was — The  supreme  miracle  is  how  belief  in  Jesus'  Resurrection 
arose  and  this  psychology  enables  us  now  at  least  in  part  to  understand 
and  trace  the  development  stages  of  this  great  affirmation — What  is  the 
Holy  Ghost? — ^The  psychology  of  the  conversion  of  Paul  and  his  dual 
nature — He  knew  little  of  Jesus  save  that  he  died  and  rose — Did  he 
know  the  pagan  cults  of  death  and  resurrection? — The  psychology  of 
Pentecost,  the  Ascension,  and  the  apocalypse. 

JESUS'  eschatological  conceptions  have  in  recent  decades  come 
to  be  almost  as  important  as  the  mythic  problem  itself,  and 
views  concerning  them  are  no  less  opposite.    Jesus'  utterances 
on  the  subject  were  thought  to  be  his  own  until  the  authenticity  of  the 

39a 


JESUS'  ESCHATOLOGY  393 

apocalyptic  documents  was  established.  They  showed  that  eschatology 
was  a  very  prominent  feature  of  his  age,  so  that  his  own  views,  what- 
ever they  were,  came  to  seem  less  new  and  original.  The  prophets 
thought  the  Messianic  Kingdom  belonged  to  the  present  world-order, 
while  the  apocalyptic  representations  in  Jesus'  own  time  made  the 
Kingdom  not  only  a  future  but  a  new  order  of  things.  T.  Colani^  held 
that  Jesus  at  first  sought  only  complete  communion  with  God  and 
nothing  else,  but  as  he  proceeded  in  teaching  the  Kingdom  his  con- 
sciousness grew  Messianic,  and  he  expected  it  to  come  slowly  by  organic 
development  and  not  by  the  way  of  a  catastrophic  denouement.  As 
his  views  on  the  Kingdom  grew  inward  he  came  to  accept  the  title 
of  Messiah,  which  he  could  not  do  so  long  as  he  thought  it  material 
and  Da\ddic.  In  accepting  this  view  he  also  accepted  the  role  of  suf- 
fering which  was  integral  to  the  very  idea  of  Messianity,  and  he  trusted 
that  the  effects  of  the  Passion  would  establish  the  Kingdom.  If  it 
was  spiritual  the  idea  of  a  glorious  second  coming  must  be  di^opped. 
Hence  the  Jewish  eschatology  would  have  to  be  discarded  save  certain 
natural  symbolic  allusions  to  it.  We  must  therefore  eliminate  passages 
which  teach  the  speedy  spread  of  the  Kingdom  among  the  gentiles, 
and  also  the  idea  of  a  preliminary  judgment  because  of  men's  lack  of 
receptivity.  Most  of  Matthew  xxiv  and  Mark  xiii,  as  well  as  much  of 
Luke  xxi  must  thus  be  regarded  as  unauthentic  interpolations.  Jesus 
never  expected  to  return,  from  heaven  to  finish  his  work.  That  was 
finished  by  his  death.  We  can  never,  however,  entirely  explain  Jesus' 
preaching  on  these  points  from  the  history  of  his  time.  Thus  Colani 
completely  rejects  eschatology,  although  he  would  do  so  only  by  textual 
analysis  and  criticism. 

Later  G.  Volkmar^  took  up  the  problem,  resting  all  authentic 
knowledge  on  Mark,  which  he  dated  73  a.  d.,  five  years  after  the  Book 
of  Revelation\was  written.  Matthew  for  him  is  a  tertiary  compilation 
and  so  Volkmar's  effort  to  eliminate  eschatology  was  made  easy,  for  he 
had  only  Mark  to  deal  with.  The  contemporary  ideas  of  Messianity 
were  such  that  Jesus  could  not  possibly  have  claimed  it.  The  concept 
of  a  spiritual  Kingdom  came  later.  In  Jesus'  time  only  the  political 
ideas  of  the  Kingdom  were  known,  and  any  one  who  awakened  hopes 
of  this  kind  would  certainly  share  the  fate  of  the  Baptist.    Jesus  thus 


i"Jfisus-Christ  et  les  croyances  messianiques  de  son  temps."    Strassburg,  1864,  ass  P- 

*"Iesus  Nazarenus  und  die  erste  christllche  Zeit  mit  den  beiden  ersten  Erzahlern."    Zurich,  i88a,  403  p. 


394  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

had  to  be  a  political  Messiah,  or  none  at  all.  Thus  not  onlj^  escha- 
tolog>'  but  Messianity  is  ehminated.  Only  after  his  death  did  Jesus 
become  Christ.  Peter's  acclamation  of  him  as  the  Messiah  was  only 
near  the  end  of  his  career  and  anticipative  of  the  effects  of  the  Passion. 
Thus,  after  the  excision  of  a  few  other  passages,  it  appears  that  Mark, 
like  Paul,  thought  that  Jesus  became  Messiah  only  as  a  result  of  the 
Resurrection.  Jesus'  ethics  were  not  confused  by  eschatological  mo- 
tives. In  some  places,  nevertheless,  the  expectation  of  the  parousia 
reached  such  a  high  pitch  that  marriage  was  thought  useless.  This,  of 
course,  would  have  shocked  Jesus.  The  discourses  about  the  end  of 
the  world  and  the  second  coming  are  later  and  for  edification.  Jesus' 
own  view  is  found  in  the  parables  of  sowing,  the  mustard  seed,  and  of  the 
permanence  of  his  sayings.  He  never  expected  to  come  in  the  clouds. 
Ideas  of  the  second  coming  Volkmar  complains  have  been  hitherto 
slighted  or  regarded  as  too  delicate  for  discussion. 

Weiffenbach^  seeks  to  mediate  between  those  who  think  that  the 
parousia  or  the  second  coming  formed  an  integral  part  of  Jesus'  teach- 
ing, and  those,  more  in  number,  who  hold  that  he  was  misunderstood 
by  his  disciples  so  far  as  they  ascribed  to  him  belief  in  any  Uteral  or 
sensuous  form  of  it.  He  found  a  deadlock  between  these  two  views, 
and  the  way  out  that  he  sought  was  in  the  relation  between  the  parousia 
and  the  Passion.  He  dissents  from  the  view  that  Jesus'  eschatological 
sayings  acquired  this  character  from  the  way  in  which  they  are  com- 
bined, the  component  passages  themselves  having  no  trace  of  it.  Nor 
does  he  hold  that  the  little  apocalypse  (Matthew  xxiv  and  Mark  xiii) 
was  broken  up  by  irrelevancies  in  order  to  tone  down  expectation, 
since  predictions  of  a  second  coming  had  not  been  fulfilled  even  after 
Jerusalem  fell.  Weiffenbach  thinks  Jesus  did  express  the  thought  of 
his  own  near  return,  but  did  so  moderately,  and  that  Jewish- Christian 
eschatology  amplified  these  sayings.  The  belief  is  waxing,  not  waning, 
in  these  chapters,  and  the  disciples'  hopes  were  too  strong  to  be  ac- 
counted for  solely  by  current  Jewish  expectations;  otherwise  Jesus' 
teachings  and  the  faith  of  primitive  Christians  are  unexplained.  If  we 
eliminate  all  other  predictments,  Jesus'  admonition  at  the  Mount  of 
Olives  to  watch  though  the  hour  was  unknown,  is  the  key  to  unlock 
and  the  standard  by  which  to  measure  every  other  passage  touching 
this  subject.    Proceeding,  then,  to  test  all  other  New  Testament 

'"Der  Wiederkunftsgedanke  Jesu."    Leipzig,  1873,  434  p. 


JESUS'  ESCHATOLOGY  395 

passages  by  this,  we  have  as  a  result  only  a  colourless  and  rather  con- 
tentless  thought  of  an  early  personal  return.  All  that  does  not  square 
with  this  authentic  form  can  be  rather  ruthlessly  eliminated.  Jesus 
never  thought  of  judging  the  world,  and  this  function  was  never  as- 
cribed to  the  Messiah  until  later.  He  did  not  foresee  the  destruction 
of  Jerusalem.  His  charge  to  the  Twelve,  so  far  as  it  implied  a  second 
coming,  was  an  anachronism.  The  charge  at  the  Last  Supper  is 
simply  chiliastic.  As  his  life  drew  toward  its  close,  Jesus  did  express 
the  hope  of  coming  back,  but,  as  the  parousia  was  deferred,  this  became 
more  and  more  embellished,  and  missionaries  to  the  gentiles  grew 
cautious  about  calling  it  near.  He  did  not  offer  even  to  save  Jerusalem 
from  its  fate,  and  so  his  return  was  put  further  and  further  into  the 
future.  This  contentless  expectation  may  prove  the  identity  of  the 
prediction  of  the  parousia  and  of  the  Resurrection.  The  conduct  of 
the  disciples  after  the  Resurrection  shows  that  it  had  not  been  very 
clearly  predicted.  Both  were  connected  with  Jesus'  death  and  both 
were  expected  about  the  same  time;  hence  they  were  at  first  thought  to 
be  one  and  the  same.  Only  after  his  death  were  the  two  differentiated. 
The  Resurrection  did  not  bring  what  the  parousia  had  promised,  but 
the  eschatology  he  had  dampened  during  his  life  now  flourished  very 
rankly. 

Baldensperger^  assumes  that  Jesus'  conception  of  the  Kingdom  was 
dual.  The  spiritual  and  eschatological  elements  were  equally  strong 
and  were  also  mutually  conditioned.  Thus  Jesus  began  with  the  pur- 
pose of  founding  an  invisible  Kingdom,  but  expected  that  it  would  be 
realized  miraculously.  Hence  Jesus'  consciousness  was  in  some  sense 
double.  His  Messianic  consciousness  was  a  special  form  of  the  sense 
of  unique  relation  to  God.  This  had  power  to  transform  the  Jewish 
Messianic  self-consciousness,  although  perhaps  the  latter  was  itself 
religious  in  Jesus  as  was  his  unique  sense  of  union.  Thus  for  him  the 
term  "  Son  of  Man  "  would  have  both  an  apocalyptic  and  also  an  ethical 
and  religious  sense.  This  dual  self-consciousness  of  Jesus  Balden- 
sperger  explains  genetically  and  historically.  At  the  start  eschatology 
affected  Jesus'  expectation  of  the  Kingdom  and  his  Messianic  conscious- 
ness. After  the  latter  arose  at  the  baptism,  he  rejected  the  ideal  of  a 
Davidic  or  warring  king,  and  began  to  found  a  Kingdom  by  preaching. 
Thus  for  a  time  a  spiritual  Kingdom  was  his  ideal  and  the  Messianic 

•"Das  Selbstbewusstsein  Jesu  im  Licbte  der  messianischen  UofFnungen  seiner  Zeit."    Strassburg,  i88S,  193  p. 


396  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

eschatology  faded,  or  he  was  silent  about  it,  perhaps  for  pedagogic 
reasons,  fearing  a  political  movement  by  his  followers,  which  the  Ro- 
man rule  would  crush.  His  other  reasons  for  not  revealing  his  Mes- 
sianity  vanished  when  he  had  deliberately  decided  to  die  and  return 
in  the  clouds.  Until  then  he  knew  not  when  or  how  the  Kingdom  would 
come.  Until  Peter's  confession  the  disciples  had  only  the  haziest 
ideas  of  his  Messianity.  This  was  the  preparatory  period  of  waiting 
and  watching.  For  him  it  was  a  period  of  acute  struggle  between  his 
religious  conviction  of  his  Messianity  and  the  old  national  ideals  of 
this  office.  In  the  second  period  he  became  clear  and  harmonious. 
By  accepting  suffering  his  inner  peace  became  ineluctable,  great  and 
deep,  for  now  he  knew  when  and  how  God  would  fulfil  his  promises. 
It  would  be  with  the  second  coming  of  the  Messiah.  Now  he  was  Son 
of  Man  and  judge  of  the  world.  Would  the  people  accept  him  as  Mes- 
siah? To  determine  this  he  went  to  Jerusalem,  and  at  first  they  ac- 
claimed him  with  great  heartiness;  but  later  when  they  saw  that 
he  did  not  and  could  not  fulfil  their  ideas,  the  reaction  came  and  was 
so  great  that  in  it  he  lost  his  life.  The  sensation  that  Baldensperger's 
book  caused  was  due  to  the  fact  that  it  so  diametrically  opposed 
preceding  opinions  on  the  subject,  by  assuming  that  Jesus  had  a  well- 
developed  eschatology  instead  of  none. 

J.  Weiss'^  solution  of  the  problem  is  strongly  pro-eschatological. 
The  Kingdom,  which  is  the  key  to  the  problem,  has  no  likeness  to  any 
other,  in  that  it  is  entirely  futuristic  and  so  in  a  sense  supermundane. 
The  best  index  of  its  advance  is  the  waning  of  Satan's  kingdom,  and 
hence  Jesus  cast  out  devils.  Jesus  merely  proclaimed  it  just  as  the 
Baptist  had  done,  except  that  Jesus  knew  that  he  was  the  Messiah; 
but  he  exercised  none  of  the  functions  of  the  office,  but  simply  waited 
for  God  to  bring  in  the  Kingdom  supernaturally.  He  sent  out  the 
disciples  to  preach  its  nearness,  but  he  did  not  know  its  date  although 
he  believed  it  near.  But  as  obstacles  accumulated,  he  realized  that 
it  must  be  more  remote  than  he  had  thought,  and  at  length  saw  he 
must  die  before  it  came,  and  as  a  conditio  sine  qua  non  to  its  advent. 
He  realized  that  he  must  die  not  merely  for  his  own  little  group  but 
for  many.  This  depressive  foresight  of  his  demise  was,  however,  more 
or  less  compensated  for  by  a  conviction  that  he  would  return  glorified  in 
the  sense  that,  since  Daniel,  men  had  expected  the  Messiah  to  come. 

>"Die  Predjgt  Jesu  vom  Reiche  Gottes."    GiSttingen,  igoo,  2d  ed.,  314  p. 


JESUS'  ESCHATOLOGY  397 

These  great  ideals  not  only  consoled  him  for,  but  enabled  him  to  tri- 
umph over,  death.  He  was  to  come  thus  gloriously,  and  very  soon, 
and  justify  to  his  friends  before  they  died  his  predictions  of  the  King- 
dom. The  judgment  day  was  to  precede.  The  Kingdom  was  trans- 
cendental enough  not  to  arouse  poUtical  fears,  yet  it  was  by  no  means 
merely  within  the  soul.  Its  ethics  was  of  a  kind  to  make  men  free 
from  this  world,  and  hence  it  is  mainly  negative  and  penitential. 
The  sense  of  Messianity  to  which  he  awoke  at  the  baptism  was  not  a 
present  affair,  but  a  future  though  assured  potentiality.  Here  and 
now  Jesus  is  only  a  man  and  a  prophet.  Son  of  Man  is  a  purely 
eschatological  term,  although  it  is  not  clear  whether  his  disciples  thought 
it  referred  to  his  present  state  or  his  future  rank,  or  thought  it  desig- 
nated another  person.  Thus  the  Messianic  self-consciousness  of  Jesus 
as  expressed  in  the  title.  Son  of  Man,  shares  in  the  transcendental 
apocalyptic  character  of  Jesus'  idea  of  the  Kingdom  of  God  and  can- 
not be  separated  from  it.  Jesus'  eschatology  was  thus  quite  primitive 
and  constitutive.  By  accepting  suffering  he  "  emerged  from  passivity." 
The  most  extreme  eschatologist  is  A.  Schweitzer.  *  He  holds  that 
Jesus  and  most  of  the  other  New  Testament  writers  were  possessed  if 
not  obsessed  by  the  idea  that  the  world  was  to  end  before  their  death. 
In  this  we  have  the  key  to  explain  the  epistles  and  especially  the 
Gospels  in  a  way  which  must  profoundly  modify  our  conceptions  of 
Jesus'  views,  and  which  has  been  called  "the  last  word"  in  the  higher 
criticism.  Condemning  all  current  liberal  and  orthodox  views  alike, 
Schweitzer  tries  to  show  that  about  all  that  Jesus  said  and  did  was 
prompted  by  a  dominant  and  ever-present  conviction  that  the  world- 
order  was  to  come  to  an  early  and  sudden  end.  The  impending 
change  was  to  be  by  a  miraculous  intervention  of  God.  When  Jesus 
sent  out  the  Twelve  he  fully  expected  the  parousia  to  occur  before  they 
returned.  The  persecutions  and  tribulations  foretold  were  immediate 
and  for  them,  and  had  no  reference  to  later  troubles,  for  the  very  ex- 
istence of  a  Church  was  never  dreamed  of  by  Jesus.  All  the  calamities 
he  foretold  were  to  befall  them  on  this  trip,  and  they  were  exhorted 
to  endure  to  its  end.  Before  they  came  back  the  Son  of  Man  would 
have  come.    To  Jesus'  consternation  they  came  back  safe  and  sound. 

«''Das  Messianitats-  und  Leidens-Geheimnis;  eine  Skizze  des  Lebens  Jesu."  Leipzig,  1901  log  p  His  view  b 
Tr^r^n-'"  .'i?i,"9^"^'^'u''*^  ^u''  Leben-Tesu-Fprschunf."  a.  Aufl  igii.  See  Kap.  15,  16.  and  especially  ai.  See  also 
4*^^  I?  .Xu  Church  at  the  Cross-Roads  "  for  a  fair  y  good  English  presentation  of  Schweitzer's  view*  and  C.  W. 
tininet  s    Ihe  Eschatological  Question  in  the  Gospels.      London,  igia,  337  p. 


398  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

Hence,  after  a  little  new  orientation,  he  abandoned  his  promising 
work  of  heralding  the  Kingdom  in  Galilee,  and  fled  to  the  north  "in 
order  to  escape  his  followers  who  dogged  his  footsteps"  to  be  with  him 
when  the  Kingdom  should  break  forth  upon  the  world.  From  this 
crisis  on  we  hear  no  more  of  the  suffering  of  the  elect,  but  only  of  Jesus 
himself.  The  Jewish  apocalyptists  of  whom  Jesus  became  the  chief 
exponent  all  exp'ected  tribulation  as  "birthpangs"  of  the  Messiah,  but 
conceived  him  as  above  and  aloof  from  it.  It  was  with  this  heavenly 
being  that  Jesus  had  in  his  first  period  come  to  identify  himself,  but 
now  he  reaUzed  not  only  that  he  must  suffer  but  that  he  must  suffer 
and  die  alone.  He  must  enter  upon  a  "  quest  of  death  "  for  the  benefit 
of  others  as  a  conditio  sine  qua  non  of  the  advent  of  the  Kingdom.  Now 
he  came  to  regard  himself  as  the  future  Messiah.  In  his  present 
earthly  life,  however,  he  was  merely  a  proclaimer  and  preparer,  and  it 
was  an  anxiously  guarded  secret  that  he  was  the  future  King  and  judge 
of  the  world.  He  was  displeased  when  Peter  revealed  the  secret  of 
his  Messianity  to  the  rest  of  the  Twelve.  It  leaked  out  again,  how- 
ever, involuntarily  in  the  ecstasy  described  as  the  Transfiguration. 
Jesus  went  to  Jerusalem  solely  in  order  to  die  there.  If  he  taught  there 
it  was  only  to  provoke  the  rulers  to  slay  him.  Clearing  the  temple  and 
denouncing  the  Pharisees,  in  which  his  Messianic  consciousness  again 
broke  through,  were  really  to  the  same  end.  The  entry  to  and  all  that 
he  did  in  Jerusalem  were  Messianic  for  him,  but  were  not  so  for  the 
people,  who  only  thought  him  a  prophet.  The  synoptists  here  and 
often  elsewhere  represent  Jesus  as  playing  with  his  great  secret.  The 
question  of  the  high  priest,  however,  showed,  to  Jesus'  surprise,  that 
he  had  in  some  way  come  into  possession  of  this  secret.  In  fact,  Judas 
had  told  him,  and  this  constituted  the  act  of  betrayal  which  the  story 
of  the  kiss  merely  masks.  Thus  Jesus  died  because  two  of  his  disciples 
had  betrayed  his  secret,  first  Peter  to  the  rest,  and  later  Judas  to  the 
high  priest.  Jesus,  too,  admitted  it,  so  that  there  should  be  the  two 
witnesses  required  for  his  condemnation.  The  people,  who  had  been 
subtly  informed  of  his  claim,  no  longer  held  him  to  be  a  great  prophet, 
as  they  did  when  he  entered  the  city,  but  now  deemed  him  a  fanatic. 
The  end  of  all  we  know  about  Jesus  was  that  he  was  crucified,  and  the 
last  we  ever  shall  hear  of  him  was  his  cry  of  despair  at  being  forsaken. 

In  developing  the  above  conclusions  Schweitzer  has  no  use  for 
John  or  even  for  Luke,  and  condemns  Mark  for  knowing  nothing  of  any 


JESUS'  ESCHATOLOGY  399 

struggle  or  any  development  in  Jesus'  soul;  for  being  without  intelli- 
gence as  to  the  meaning  of  his  entry  to  Jerusalem;  for  being  unable  to 
distinguish  between  the  early  period  of  success  and  the  later  one  of 
failure.  He  otherwise  discredits  the  Second  Gospel,  but  on  the  whole 
thinks  himself  a  justifier  of  Gospel  tradition  because  he  both  puts  out 
of  and  puts  into  the  Scriptures  far  less  than  his  predecessors  on  the 
eschatological  line  had  done.  According  to  his  \dew,  Jesus  was  reared 
in  an  atmosphere  charged  to  the  saturation  point  with  eschatological 
ideas,  and  in  his  ministry  he  "sealed"  those  to  whom  entrance  to 
the  Kingdom  could  be  guaranteed.  Baptism  thus  came  to  predestine 
the  elect  to  salvation.  Feeding,  too,  was  an  eschatological  sacrament. 
Those  who  shared  Jesus'  table  in  obscurity  would  do  so  in  glory. 
This  sacrament  was  really  unique,  for  it  worked  quite  independently  of 
the  understanding  of  the  communicants.  The  phrases  about  binding 
and  loosing  are  thus  authentic  and  pregnant.  Schweitzer  interprets 
the  apocalyptic  language  of  Jesus,  not  as  imagery  or  symbol  but  as  all 
of  it  crude,  Hteral,  and  material.  The  ethics  of  Jesus  was  all  of  it 
ad  interim  morals.  As  the  old  world  is  just  about  to  end  people  may 
give  away  coat  and  cloak,  take  no  thought  for  the  morrow,  and  there 
is  no  need  of  loving  parents,  etc.  Jesus  is  no  great  moral  teacher,  be- 
cause salvation  and  damnation  are  all  predestined ;  but  he  was  so  pre- 
occupied with  impending  other-worldness,  on  which  he  wished  all  to 
fix  their  souls,  that  his  ethical  teaching  was  quite  incidental.  Thus 
the  whole  history  of  Christianity  is  based  on  the  delay  of  the  parousia 
and  its  progress  is  measured  by  the  degree  of  de-eschatolization. 
Schweitzer  thus  eliminates  what  was  basal  in  the  founder's  mind.  He 
died  in  the  despair  of  disillusion  and  with  a  sense  of  absolute  failure. 
But  in  his  death  eschatology  bore  to  the  world  a  marvellous  child,  viz., 
the  early  Christian  doctrine  of  literal,  not  to  say  physical,  immortahty. 
This  new  reHgion  of  immortality  took  the  place  of  the  old  decaying 
civilizations.  The  problem  of  just  how  this  narrow  and  extreme  apoc- 
alyptic consciousness  motivated  the  supreme  world  religion  now  opens 
before  us,  but  it  is  yet  unsolved.  The  Jesus  this  view  gives  us  is  not  a 
figure  to  whom  we  can  ascribe  our  own  ideals,  nor  is  he  one  from  whom 
the  early  Church  can  fairly  be  said  to  have  fallen  away,  but  he  is  rather 
a  person  we  cannot  understand.  Indeed  "perhaps  the  best  knowledge 
of  the  personality  and  life  of  Jesus  will  not  be  a  help  but  rather  an 
offence  to  religion"  (p.  633).    Still,  great  energy  sprang  from  this 


400  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

unprecedented  consciousness  with  its  great  oscillation  between  life- 
afl5rmation  and  life-negation.  Jesus  was  the  great  renouncer,  passing 
from  the  greatest  hope  to  the  nadir  of  despair.  Schweitzer's  Jesus, 
however,  is  far  less  "reduced"  than  the  Jesus  of  Harnack  and  of  the 
many  liberal  critics,  of  most  of  whom  he  is  the  conspicuous  opponent. 
The  Christ  of  tliis  eschatology,  though  never  until  now  understood  or 
even  dreamed  of,  looms  up  far  above  the  highest  ranges  of  humanity 
as  thus  far  known.  The  Jewish  apocalyptists  felt  that  God  had  failed, 
and  the  world  as  it  was  was  lost,  and  so  he  must  intervene  and  make  it 
over.  With  the  Jewish  history  and  temper  this  was  a  natural,  if  not 
inevitable,  result  of  centuries  of  thwarted  hopes.  It  was  obsession 
with  this  idea  that  drove  Jesus  to  his  death  and  despair.  The  problem 
how  Christianity  evolved  from  this,  which,  despite  Schweitzer's  protest, 
is  a  purely  psychological  one,  he  does  very  little  to  solve,  so  that  it  still 
challenges  us.  Until  this  is  explained  his  whole  conception,  original  and 
stimulating  as  it  is,  must  remain  in  suspense  with  doubt  predominant. 
In  response  to  these  eschatological  views  we  feel  justified  in  the 
following :  (a)  It  is  grossly  false  to  exclude  psychological  interpreta- 
tions from  this  field,  as  some  critics  so  vehemently  do.  On  the  con- 
trary, the  whole  progress  of  recent  critical  studies  of  Christianity  has 
consisted  largely  in  emancipating  it  from  merely  textual  criticism  and 
historical  research.  The  certain  data  are  so  meagre,  gappy,  and  con- 
tradictory, that  psychology  must,  even  more  than  it  has  of  late,  become 
henceforth  our  chief  guide.  Most  other  sources  are  exhausted,  and 
whether  we  wish  or  know  it,  we  are  now  confronted  by  problems  that 
only  better  knowledge  of  the  laws  of  the  human  soul  and  better  appli- 
cation of  those  already  known  can  hold  out  any  valid  hope  of  solving. 
In  fact,  the  Jesus  problems  have  already  become,  some  solely  and  all 
increasingly,  those  of  psychology  or  of  the  higher  anthropology,  and 
we  can  distrust  either  the  sincerity  or  the  knowledge  of  all  experts  in 
the  field  who  deny  this.  That  it  has  been  so  long  ignored  or  excluded 
here  has  been  the  great  calamity,  and  that  it  is  now  in  order  is  the 
brightest  hope,  of  the  Christianity  of  the  present  and  the  future. 
Jesus'  mission  was  to  save  souls,  and  he  was  the  world's  master  prag- 
matic psychologist,  all  intuitively  and  for  the  most  part  unconsciously, 
none  the  less  but  rather  more  so  because  he  was  so  unintrospective 
and  acted  and  spoke  so  predominantly  from  out  of  the  depths  of  his 
uniquely  rich  and  deep  autistic  nature,  as  we  shall  point  out  latei. 


JESUS'  ESCHATOLOGY  401 

Henceforth  our  motto  must  become  bonus  psychologus,  bonus  Christo- 
logus,  for  if  there  are  next  steps  impending  and  inevitable,  the  psychol- 
ogy of  the  large,  genetic,  and  analytic-synthetic  type  will  be  the 
necessary  prerequisite  for  taking  them.  Already  those  who  have  done 
most  and  best  in  this  field  have  used  psychological  data,  methods,  or 
principles,  though  often  unaware  of  it,  and  without  technical  training 
in  this  discipline. 

(b)  The  first  step  in  the  psychological  evaluation  of  the  eschato- 
logical  movement  as  above  outlined  is  plain  enough.  The  history  and 
diathesis  of  the  Jewish  mind  being  what  they  were,  the  eschatological 
movement  was  inevitable.  Revering  a  deity  whose  chief  attribute 
was  that  he  loved  justice  and  hated  iniquity,  and  whose  interventions 
in  human  affairs  had  always  been  in  behalf  of  justice,  to  see  that  the 
good  were  rewarded  and  the  bad  punished — a  God  who  both  in  exter- 
nal affairs  and  in  the  souls  of  men  was  always  struggling  with  Satan 
although  vastly  more  powerful  than  his  adversary,  so  that  if  he  chose 
he  could  at  any  moment  put  forth  his  might  for  disciphnary  or  any 
other  unknown  purpose — it  was  inevitable  that  the  devotees  of  such  a 
God  should  believe  that  in  his  own  good  time  he  would  arise  in  his 
might,  sweep  away  all  evil,  and  establish  an  order  of  things  after  his 
own  will.  He  could  do  it,  for  only  a  few  score  generations  ago  he 
had  created  all  things  out  of  nothing  and  pronounced  them  good.  Why 
he  who  brought  his  favourites  out  of  Egj^t  and  gave  all  the  riches  of 
Palestine  into  their  hands,  who  had  guided  the  patriarchs,  had  never- 
theless permitted  the  captivities  and  the  other  calamities  that  had 
befallen  his  chosen,  was  hard  to  explain.  For  centuries,  whenever 
disaster  came,  his  worshippers  had  been  incHned  to  take  the  blame  upon 
themselves,  and  at  every  misfortune  had  followed  the  lead  of  the 
prophets  and  examined  their  own  hearts  and  lives  to  find  out  the  hidden 
sin  there.  They  had  a  fixed  idea,  older  than  the  days  of  Job,  that 
tribulation  was  sent  and  was  meant  as  punishment,  so  that  they  must 
either  confess  sin  and  do  penance  for  it  or  else  accuse  God  of  injustice, 
rob  him  of  his  cardinal  attribute,  and  make  him  a  being  to  be  cursed 
instead  of  trusted.  If,  on  the  other  hand,  and  in  so  far  as,  they  felt 
their  sufferings  undeserved,  there  was  but  one  alternative — to  renounce 
Yahveh  or  to  trust  that  he  would  right  things  in  the  future.  Because 
they  did  the  latter  the  future  became  a  palladium  ever  fuller  of  hopes 
deferred,  and  they  became  more  and  more  uniquely  the  people  of  the 


402  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

promises.  They  lived  on  expectations,  and  made  ever  heavier  drafts 
upon  the  bank  of  futurity.  This  went  on  for  generations.  Yahveh 
was  the  embodiment  of  their  own  strong  racial  soul  which  would  not  be 
oven\'helmed  by  any  series  of  disasters.  A  weaker  or  less  persistent 
stirp  would  have  given  up  and  renounced  their  allegiance,  but  this 
they  could  not  do,  and  so  the  tension  between  a  sense  of  their  own 
merits  and  their  fate  grew  ever  greater.  The  world  about  them  be- 
came worse.  The  wicked  flourished  and  the  good  suffered,  yet  God 
was  still  on  his  throne,  and  inscrutable  as  was  his  delay  he  surely 
could  not  long  put  off  coming  for  recompense.  Thus  the  prophetic 
mood  acuminated  and  gradually  passed  over  in  certain  eager  nervous 
souls  into  the  apocalyptic  consciousness.  The  state  of  mind  of  Daniel 
and  Ezekiel  was  revived  in  the  wild  welter  of  words  and  images  of 
Enoch,  and  the  conceptions  of  III  Esdras  and  Baruch  were  revived. 
The  date  of  the  culmination  thus  came  ever  nearer.  The  awful  dies 
irae  and  the  new  dispensation,  the  conquest  and  binding  of  Satan,  were 
just  at  hand.  The  wicked  would  meet  their  doom,  the  righteous  shine 
forth  in  a  great  and  terrible  compensation,  and  beatitudes  would  be 
realized  for  the  worthy,  in  whose  souls  joy  would  reign  in  a  new  world 
purged  of  iniquity  and  all  defilement.  A  new  paradise  of  wish-fulfilment 
would  take  the  place  of  the  present  sin-sodden  world,  in  contem- 
plating the  imagery  of  which  some  minds  grew  ecstatic.  Ever>^  prom- 
ise and  prophecy  was  on  the  very  point  of  fulfilment.  The  lowly 
would  be  exalted  and  the  high  brought  down.  We  deem  the  modern 
Adventist  unbalanced  or  insincere,  or  both,  but  under  the  conditions  of 
that  era  no  conviction  could  have  been  more  sincere.  Rather  it  was  a 
struggle  between  the  soundest  and  most  vigorous  moral  sense  on  the 
one  hand,  and  wonted  thought  processes  on  the  other,  in  which  the 
former  triumphed.  Never  was  there  such  utter  abandonment  to  the 
ethical  instincts.  Eschatology  was  a  saturnalia  of  justice,  the  apo- 
theosis of  reformatory  zeal,  although  men  had  simply  to  wait  and  look 
on  while  the  power  that  makes  for  righteousness  does  its  prophesied 
work  in  a  new  and  higher  creation,  completing  that  of  genesis.  Thus 
by  a  process  in  the  race-soul  psychologically  analogous  to  that  in  the 
victim  of  delusions  of  persecution  who  at  last  turns  and  instead  of  being 
persecuted  becomes  the  persecutor,  running  amuck  and  wreaking 
terrible  vengeance  on  those  he  fancies  had  wronged  him,^  so  Yahveh  at 

'See  V.  Magnaa:  "Psychiatrische  Vorlesungen."     1891-1894. 


JESUS'  ESCHATOLOGY  403 

length  will  arouse  himself  and  reestablish  justice  in  the  world  at  dread- 
ful cost  to  those  who  have  so  long  and  ever  increasingly  outraged  it. 
Eschatology  was  thus  the  form  wliich  trust  in  divine  goodness,  when 
put  under  long  and  severe  strain,  had  to  take  sooner  or  later. 

If  Weiss  and  Schweitzer  are  right,  Jesus'  consciousness  during 
the  first  period  of  his  ministry  made  him  the  consummate  unipersonal 
expression  of  this  inevitable  attitude.  If  the  existing  order  is  just 
about  to  end  in  this  way  by  God's  intervention,  nothing  matters  save 
righteousness.  Wealth,  station,  social  and  pohtical  institutions  and 
most  human  relations  are  negHgible,  and  nothing  is  of  worth  that  does 
not  ensure  entrance  to  the  new  Kingdom.  All  is  suddenly  seen  sub 
specie  eternitatis  and  there  is  radical  transvaluation  of  all  values,  so 
that  never  was  there  such  a  basis  of  appeal  to  a  new  orientation  and 
right  perspective,  to  motives  to  do  and  be,  and  at  short  notice,  the 
very  best  possible.  No  one  ever  had  such  a  moral  leverage  upon  the 
soul  or  the  world,  and  nothing  could  have  such  transforming  power 
over  the  minds  and  hearts  of  all  who  shared  this  conception,  the  dis- 
covery and  reinstatement  of  which  marks  a  great  epoch  in  this  field. 
It  was  a  situation  and  an  attitude  impossible  before  or  since.  The 
world  was  a  ship  suddenly  found  to  be  fast  sinking  to  perdition,  with 
only  a  few  who  grasped  the  awful  situation  or  observed  implicitly  the 
orders  of  the  captain  who  had  completely  thought  out  the  only  condi- 
tions that  could  ever  make  a  happy  landfall  on  blissful  shores. 

(c)  Granting  that  all  this  is  normal  psychodynamics,  why  should 
a  few  weeks'  or  even  months'  delay  cause  the  whole  long-incubated 
conception  of  Jesus  to  collapse?  Why  this  sudden  disillusion  or  bank- 
ruptcy of  a  faith  on  which  so  recently  all  had  been  staked?  When  or 
before  the  Twelve  returned,  Jesus,  according  to  Schweitzer,  had  seen 
all  this  to  be  a  dreadful  mistake.  The  Lord  would  not  presently  come 
to  rejuvenate  the  world.  Jesus'  whole  scheme  of  things  and  his  entire 
program  had  aborted.  Was  the  motivation  sufficient?  Was  the 
new  idea  that  he  must  take  upon  his  own  person  the  tribulation  that  he 
had  predicted  for  others  a  psychokinetic  equivalent  of  the  old  idea? 
Was  it  germane  for  the  prospect  of  dire  disaster  to  others  to  pass  so 
readily  to  the  conception  that  he  himself  must  bear  it  all  and  alone? 
Did  he  accept  the  role  of  suffering  in  any  degree  as  a  self-imposed 
penance  for  his  mistake? 

After   the  "quest  for  death"  began  why  should  there  be  any 


404  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

secrecy  about  his  Messianity?  If  we  grant  the  great  change  in  Jesus' 
plans  as  Schweitzer  conceives  it,  its  most  probable  objective  cause  was 
one  to  which  he  does  not  allude,  viz.,  during  or  before  the  absence  of  the 
Twelve  Jesus  had  learned  something  concerning  the  pagan  conceptions 
of  a  dying  god  in  the  sense  of  Frazer,  etc.,  and  had  passed  in  some  sense 
and  degree  from  the  Jewish  to  the  gentile  conception  of  the  way  of 
salvation.  He,  like  Paul,  saw  a  great  and  new  light,  although  a  very 
different  one.  If  a  king,  quasi-king,  or  god,  like  Osiris,  Attis,  Demeter, 
or  ISIithra,  died  originally  in  the  fall  to  return  in  the  spring,  that  was 
indeed  better  than  that  all  or  many  should  suffer.  This  may  have 
suggested  the  new  or  greatly  modified  role.  The  Jewish  ideas  of  vica- 
rious offerings  for  ransom  and  atonement  were  now  supplemented  in 
Jesus'  mind  by  those  of  the  immolation  of  a  royal  or  divine  being. 
The  ancient  Jews  were  far  beyond  the  old  custom  of  human  sacrifices, 
and  Yahveh  had  long  accepted  bulls,  rams,  and  even  turtle-doves; 
but  they  knew  nothing  of  offering  up  men  of  low  or  high  degree,  still 
less  royalty,  and  least  of  all  deities.  But  by  the  new  turn  of  Jesus' 
thoughts  his  sense  of  self-divinity  must  have  been  greatly  augmented 
along  with  his  conception  of  his  own  worth  and  dignity.  Such  a  being 
as  he  now  deemed  himself  could  die  for  many  and  they  go  free.  The 
suffering  servant  of  Yahveh  is  not  offered  up  for  others.  He  is  only 
the  personified  soul  of  the  race  itself,  and  endures  to  the  end,  no  matter 
how  afflicted.  Not  so  the  old  cult  quests  of  the  mystery  religions  of 
the  lands  bounding  the  eastern  Mediterranean  from  Egypt  around  to 
Thrace.  Jesus  on  this  view  found  himself,  we  know  not  how,  driven 
by  a  new  culture  current,  more  conformable  to  Paul's  idea  of  vicarious 
atonement  than  to  his  own  previous  conception.  His  present  new 
view,  then,  conforms  not  only  to  the  Jewish  but  at  many  points  even 
more  closely  to  the  old  gentile  religions  which  originated  in  nature 
worship;  or  rather  it  was  a  new  synthesis,  and  hence  of  incalculably 
greater  scope  and  efficiency. 

The  inner  cause  for  Jesus'  conversion  from  his  first  to  his  second 
plan,  assuming  this  to  have  occurred,  must  have  been  that  something 
had  increased  his  certainty  that  he  was  the  Messiah,  and  given  a 
greatly  enhanced  sense  of  the  dignity  of  this  office.  The  greater  he 
felt  this  and  himself  to  be,  the  more  effective  would  be  his  self-immola- 
tion. Perhaps  this  would  account  for  his  change  to  a  "  quest  of  death," 
without  assuming  discouragement  over  the  results  of  the  initial  propa- 


JESUS'  ESCHATOLOGY  405 

ganda  of  his  followers.  To  consent  to  die  is  far  more  than  to  accept 
tribulation,  and  he  may  have  felt  that  his  psychalgia  in  doing  the  former 
was  equal  to  the  sum  of  that  of  many  others  who  underwent  affliction. 
Also,  the  more  superman  he  felt  himself  to  be,  the  greater  the  quantum 
of  affliction  necessary  to  quench  his  soul.  Thus,  with  every  addition 
to  the  sum  total  of  affirmation  of  Hfe  and  its  negation,  the  larger  the 
number  of  others  his  experience  would  exempt  from  the  need  of  suffer- 
ing. If  he  really  deliberately  provoked  his  enemies  to  kill  him,  one 
motive  might  have  been  thereby  to  enhance  their  guilt.  Feeling  him- 
self divine,  so  that  it  would  be  a  sacrilege  to  lay  violent  hands  on  him, 
every  offence  committed  against  his  person  would  be  vastly  more  hein- 
ous than  if  against  a  mere  man  who  had  none  of  this  inviolabihty. 
Hence  their  punishment  would  be  both  greater  and  surer.  It  would 
provoke  the  Father  to  hurry  the  intervention  of  justice.  To  get  him- 
self abused  and  slain  must  arouse  Yahveh  to  make  an  end  of  his  delay 
and  to  come  quickly  to  wreak  vengeance  on  those  who  dared  to  do 
violence  to  his  only  Son.  Perhaps  Jesus  felt  that  his  extremity  would 
afford  the  Lord  not  only  an  opportunity  but  an  irresistible  incentive 
to  come  quickly.  Every  new  adversity  on  the  way  to  death  would  be  a 
new  call  to  God  to  appear  and  stop  the  tragedy  before  the  final  scene. 
This  is  psychologically  natural.  But  it  was  not  done  in  a  paroxysm  of 
hate,  suffering  himself  in  order  that  his  enemies  might  suffer  more. 
It  was  rather  a  drastic  and  desperate  appeal  to  the  Father  to  delay  no 
longer,  but  to  arouse  himself  from  his  apathy  and  to  bring  in  the  King- 
dom by  giving  to  both  good  and  bad  their  meet  reward.  But  even  this 
last  desperate  and  pathetic  appeal  failed,  and  the  awful  tragedy  pro- 
ceeded to  its  fatal  and  pathetic  end.  Even  if  Jesus'  course  was  not 
v/ithout  a  suggestion  of  patheticism,  it  was  based  on  an  invincible  belief 
that  the  cosmos  and  its  Lord  were  moral  to  the  core.  Perhaps  the 
pathos  of  it  was  that  he  never  dreamed,  when  he  set  his  face  toward 
Jerusalem  and  death,  that  he  would  be  called  on  really  to  go  on  to  the 
tragic  end.  On  this  view  he  must  have  died  in  the  agony  of  utter  de- 
spair, feehng  that  his  sense  of  Messianity  was  a  delusion.  Still, 
although  he  felt  forsaken  he  never  renounced  or  denounced  the 
Father  so  that  there  is  no  intimation  that  his  faith  in  the  ultimate 
coming  of  the  Kingdom  was  weakened.  It  was  only  still  further 
procrastination.  So  far,  then,  this  interpretation  conforms  to 
psychological  laws.    All  this  might  normally  have  happened,  and  it 


4o6  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

is  for  textual  criticism  and  history  to  determine  whether  or  not  it  did 
actually  occur  here. 

(d)  Was  there  sufficient  motivation  for  the  passion  for  secrecy 
on  the  part  of  Jesus  as  to  his  conviction  that  he  was  the  Messiah? 
Incomplete  certainty  would  have  been  one  motive,  but  his  conviction, 
according  to  the  eschatologists,  was  no  less  than  plenary  at  the  begin- 
ning of  the  second  period,  and  then  it  was  that  he  came  nearest  to 
betraying  it.  Before  this  it  may  not  have  been  complete,  and  later  he 
may  have  had  moments  of  waning  faith  in  himself.  But  why,  during 
the  time  he  felt  surest  of  it,  should  he  have  hesitated  to  tell  his  inti- 
mates? Megalomaniacs  often  persistently  tend  to  conceal  their  de- 
lusions of  greatness  from  others,  and  it  is  only  when  they  become 
pretty  well  fixed  in  their  conviction  of  them  that  they  speak  of  them 
openly.  A  king's  son,  reared  among  peasants,  having  just  found  out 
his  royal  parentage,  might  hesitate  before  revealing  his  newfound  dig- 
nity to  his  humble  companions.  To  do  so  might  mean  weakness  and 
vanity,  and  might  ahenate  his  closest  friends  by  inciting  jealousy. 
It  is  impossible  to  explain  Jesus'  reticence  on  the  subject  without  be- 
lieving that  he  felt  his  disciples  incapable  of  comprehending  or  sym- 
pathizing with  his  claims.  He  felt  them  to  be  vessels  unfit  for  being 
repositories  of  his  sacredly  cherished  secret.  He  could  not  take  them 
into  his  confidence,  much  as  he  yearned  to  do  so,  because  he  felt  them 
incompetent,  untrustworthy,  or  perhaps  both.  He  could  tell  them  of 
a  new  and  higher  order  of  things,  but  not  that  he  was  the  destined, 
though  incognito,  head  of  that  Klingdom.  They  could  help  him  pre- 
pare the  way  for  it;  but  he  whom  they  knew  in  daily  intercourse — 
walking,  talking,  eating,  and  perhaps  sleeping  with  them — dared  not 
tell  them  that  he  was  indeed  the  Christ.  Paul,  who  knew  him  not  in 
the  flesh,  could  conceive  him  thus;  but  the  disciples  were  too  much 
like  his  parents  and  townspeople,  and  knew  him  too  familiarly.  This 
implied  no  flaws  in  his  life,  but  only  that  he  did  not  conform  to  their 
ideas  of  Messianity.  They  did  not  conceive  it  as  so  humble  and  simple. 
The  disparity  between  his  conception  of  it  and  theirs,  though  perhaps 
all  the  while  slowly  diminishing,  was  too  great  to  be  spanned  by  an 
open  avowal  without  a  shock  involving  obvious  risks  which  he  hesi- 
tated to  take,  although  he  was  always  striving  to  prepare  them  for  it; 
not  "playing"  with  it  as  Schweitzer  says,  but  seeking  to  lead  them 
toward  it,  step  by  step,  without  revealing  to  them  his  purpose  to  do  so. 


JESUS'  ESCHATOLOGY  407 

If  they  rejected  it,  their  intimate  relationships  would  be  severed,  while 
if  they  accepted  it,  the  impetuous  zeal  or  indiscretion  of  some  of  them 
might  jeopardize  all.  They  would  be  sure  both  to  misconceive  it  and 
to  blazon  it  abroad  with  no  discretion  as  to  fit  time,  seasons,  or  persons. 
Therefore  it  must  remain  double-locked  in  his  own  breast,  somewhat  as 
certain  adult  secrets  are  withheld  from  children  both  because  they 
cannot  really  grasp  their  truth  and  because  they  would  have  no  reserves 
in  betraying  them  where  they  should  not.  When  his  secret  led  him  to 
enter  upon  the  road  toward  death,  he  was  still  less  able  to  explain  to 
them  his  new  Messianic  motives,  for  these  were  now  much  harder  for 
them  to  understand.  Jesus  himself  had  just  attained  these  new  in- 
sights, and  this  step  in  advance  greatly  increased  the  distance  between 
his  point  of  view  and  theirs.  They  knew  nothing  of  the  gentile  cults  of 
dying  and  rising  gods  or  culture  heroes.  This  involved  the  entrance  of 
a  new  and  alien  strain  of  cult  and  tradition.  Moreover,  they  clung  to 
him  as  their  leader  into  the  Kingdom,  and  the  possibility  of  his  death 
would  fill  them  all  with  consternation,  and  so  he  had  to  remain  un- 
known to  them  to  the  end.  The  transfiguration  was  a  wish-dream 
symbolizing  how  different  he  would  appear  to  his  friends  if  they  really 
had  known  him  as  he  felt  himself  to  be.  The  disparity  between  what 
they  thought  of  him  and  what  he  thought  of  himself  was  great  and 
growing,  and  he  may  have  brooded  much  over  it  as  a  haunting  and 
painful  theme.  It  was  also  a  sense  of  just  this  disparity,  that  came 
home  to  his  followers  after  they  thought  him  arisen,  which  constituted 
the  psychological  basis  for  the  avidity  with  which  the  theological 
representations  of  his  two  states  of  humility  and  exaltation  were  ac- 
cepted. "How  familiar  we  were,  yet  how  Httle  we  knew  him,"  they 
must  often  afterward  have  mused.  How  this  would  reinforce  their 
sense  of  the  pathos  of  his  end,  how  strongly  such  afterthoughts  would 
tend  to  bring  him  back  and  prompt  his  friends  to  reHve  every  item  of 
memory  or  association  with  him,  and  how  inevitably  it  would  predis- 
pose them  to  react  to  the  faintest  hint  or  suggestion  that  he  had  sur- 
vived or  returned,  and  to  cherish  the  sUghtest  pretext  for  any  such 
belief  that  could  be  found! 

(e)  Jesus  died,  on  this  view,  thinking  his  second  plan  a  more  utter 
failure  than  the  first  had  been,  the  most  pitiable  and  unconsolable  of 
all  deaths  in  history.  He  had  striven  for  the  highest  and  sacrificed 
everything  for  nothing,  as  if  he  were  God's  fool  and  lunatic.    His  death 


4o8  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

was  not  a  deliberate  suicide  to  save  others,  such  as  many  heroes, 
known  and  unknown  to  fame,  have  committed.  His  motivation  was 
purely  soteriological,  but  his  theory  of  forcing  Yahveh's  hand  was  in- 
sane and  his  method  had  proven  absurd,  and  when  he  expired  super- 
natural intervention  seemed  not  nearer  but  further  off,  and  more  hope- 
less than  ever.  His  attempt  to  take  the  Kingdom  by  force  had  failed, 
and  very  likely  all  hope  that  he  would  return  in  glory  and  judge  the 
world  was  entirely  extinct  in  his  own  soul,  even  though  this  was  the 
last  and  most  fondly  cherished  of  his  delusions.  How,  then,  and  in 
what  way,  did  his  grave  become  the  cradle  of  the  new  Kingdom  and  of 
the  Church  that  bears  his  name?  It  is  just  here  that  we  find  the  most 
critical  point  of  the  eschatological  scheme.  Was  it  necessary  that 
every  scintilla  of  hope  in  Jesus'  breast  should  die  out  in  order  to  make 
his  self-immolation  complete?  To  have  gone  through  the  act  of  death 
knowing  that  he  was  merely  sloughing  off  mortal  habiliments  to  emerge 
at  once  in  glory,  would  have  involved  no  sacrifice  but  might  have  even 
been  prompted  by  the  crassest  selfishness.  This  would  be  in  the  line 
of  even  animal  instincts  as  old  as  impupation.  Were  this  all  he  could 
have  laughed  death  in  the  face  and  defied  him  to  do  his  worst.  Thou- 
sands of  martyrs  did  this  later,  sustained  only  by  the  hope  of  personal 
resurgence  into  the  heavenly  Kingdom.  We  have  long  been  taught 
by  the  Church  that  his  death  was  the  more  bitter  and  tragic  because 
he  was  divine;  but  with  a  plenary  sense  of  his  divinity  and  assurance  of 
Resurrection  his  death  was  only  a  role  and  its  pain  at  worst  only  a 
birth-pang.  If,  however,  his  sense  of  sonship  itself  was  extinguished, 
he  might  have  feared,  if  not  extinction,  the  very  torments  of  hell,  for 
what  else  can  the  old  and  persistent  belief  that  he  went  among  the 
dam.ned  mean  if  not  that  he  felt  himself  one  of  them?  This  sense  must 
have  been  primal,  and  the  interpretation  of  his  supreme  psychalgia  on 
the  cross  as  a  visit  to  Hades,  in  order  to  preach  to  or  rescue  its  inmates, 
was  due  to  a  later  ambivalent  swing  of  the  pendulum  over  toward  an 
optimistic  interpretation  of  the  most  pessimistic  of  facts,  all  effected 
under  the  impulsion  of  the  subsequent  faith  in  the  Resurrection.  On 
this  view  Jesus,  between  the  beginning  of  his  second  period  and  the 
moment  of  his  death,  passed  all  the  way  from  full  assurances  of  his 
Messianity  down  to  the  extreme  "negative  eudaimonism"  of  beheving 
himself  the  one  of  all  others  most  accursed  of  Cod.  All  the  great 
affirmations  that  made  him  regarded  as  the  resurrected  Redeemer  and 


JESUS'  ESCHATOLOGY  409 

reinstated  him  so  gloriously  in  the  faith  of  the  world  as  all  that  he 
ever  thought  himself  to  be  when  at  the  acme  of  his  own  belief  in  his 
Messianism  came  later.  These  were  due  to  the  reaction  that  took  place 
in  the  souls  of  his  chosen  companions,  headed  by  Peter,  who  was  perhaps 
for  a  crucial  moment  the  only  believer  in  the  Resurrection,  but  were 
reinforced  later  by  a  rapidly  widening  consensus  that  as  early  as  Pente- 
cost had  developed  to  an  almost  cataleptic  certainty. 

The  psychological  root  of  the  whole  eschatological  theory  is 
whether  the  pathos  of  such  a  situation  can  be  conceived  of  as  so  in- 
tense, so  appealing  to  the  individual  and  to  the  folk-soul  as  to  compel 
both  to  react  to  it  by  affirming  in  the  face  of  fact  that  (a)  Jesus  did 
overcome  death  and  come  back  a  victor  over  and  not  defeated  by  the 
Great  Enemy,  and  that  (b)  Jesus'  Hfe-career  had  been  planned  before- 
hand and  carried  out  with  no  change  of  purpose;  that  there  was  never 
a  moment  or  a  sign  of  doubt  of  his  own  divinity,  and  never  a  thought 
of  any  possible  alteration  of  purpose. 

Both  these  beliefs  are  the  diametrical  opposite  of  the  truth  in  the 
case.  In  answer  to  the  problem  here  presented  we  must  remember 
how  the  fondest  human  wishes  often  tend  to  find  or  make  modes  of 
their  realization  almost  in  direct  proportion  as  they  are  thwarted,  and 
that  even  dreams  that  express  the  will  to  beUeve  tend  to  be  accepted 
as  facts.  Will  and  wish  have  thus  often  denied  the  most  palpable 
facts  and  given  the  utmost  reality  to  the  most  baseless  fictions.  But 
such  tendencies  could  never  have  created  ex  niliilo  all  the  great  affirma- 
tions of  Resurrection,  Judgment,  the  Kingdom,  etc.,  without  a  norm 
or  modulus  to  give  them  current  form  and  content.  This  must  have 
been  found  in  Jesus'  own  idea  of  himself  and  his  work  when  his  work 
was  at  its  highest  and  best.  The  chief  dynamic  agent  in  this  post- 
humous reaffirmation  of  the  best  that  had  been  in  him  was  pathos. 
This  contributed,  perhaps  more  than  anything  else,  to  make  the  first 
faint  suggestion  of  his  return  pass  so  soon  and  rapidly  up  the  scale 
of  certainty  to  complete  and  triumphant  assertion.  The  rest  fol- 
lowed naturally,  and  made  this  conviction  of  Jesus  that  he  was  to  re- 
turn, but  which  he  abandoned  at  the  end,  accepted  along  with  his  own 
highest  valuation  of  himself.  Thus,  suppose  that  the  stupendous 
miracle  of  the  Resurrection  actually  occurred;  the  other  no  less  stu- 
pendous psychological  miracle  would  yet  remain  to  be  accounted  for, 
viz.,  how  men  first  came  to  believe  in  such  a  monstrous  and  absurd 


4IO  JESUS   IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

thing,  so  contradictor}'  to  all  human  experience,  and  why  belief  in 
such  a  surd  has  been  held  to  ever  since  with  such  pertinacity.  Never 
had  fate  been  so  cruel  to  one  so  pure  and  innocent,  perhaps  beautiful, 
deep-souled,  intuitive,  sincere,  who  in  his  prime  was  foredoomed  to 
the  crudest  death.  Each  of  these  attributes,  even  when  alone,  has 
been  wont  to  arouse  apotheosizing  tendencies.  The  modern  world 
tends  to  forget  the  power  of  pathos  of  which  Jesus'  death  was  the 
world's  supreme  masterpiece,  which  no  tragedy,  antique  or  modern, 
has  ever  approached.  The  ancient  Hebrews  had  pitied  themselves 
uniquely  and  cumulatively,  and  now  in  the  survivors  of  Jesus'  circle 
all  these  tendencies  were  brought  to  a  sharp  focus  in  one  man  and  his 
supreme  act  that  typified  all  the  age-long  sufferings  of  the  race,  of 
which  he  thought  himself  the  totemic  representative  or  type-man. 
Thus  Jewish  persistence  of  hope  concentrated  itself  upon  a  unipersonal 
object.  Also,  and  what  was  far  more  to  the  point,  his  fate  was  sym- 
bolic of  that  of  his  people.  If  his  life  had  really  gone  out  in  despair, 
it  prefigured  the  extinction  of  hope  for  his  race.  It,  too,  would  end  as 
he  had  ended.  Acceptance  of  the  main  features  of  Jesus'  eschatology 
was  thus  both  pre-  and  over-determined  by  the  conscious  and  uncon- 
scious analogies  involved  in  it.  To  accept  his  despair  as  final  and  pro- 
phetic would  be  ominous  that  God  had  forsaken  his  race,  while  con- 
versely his  Resurrection  and  rehabilitation  would  only  express  the 
persistent  hope  of  the  Jews  that  they  would  be  reestablished  in  the 
world  along  the  hnes  of  their  faith  in  the  promises.  If  Jesus  survived 
the  extreme  calamity,  and  came  back  to  judge  and  rule,  so  the  chosen 
people  could  not  be  overwhelmed,  but  would  come  to  rule  the  earth. 
Thus  the  choicest  treasure  of  the  Hebrew  soul,  transferred  and  trans- 
valuated,  went  over  into  the  new  Christian  consciousness  that  arose 
from  Jesus'  tomb.  All  this  had  really  occurred  before  the  vision  that 
came  to  Paul  on  his  way  to  Damascus,  so  that  in  preaching  Jesus  he 
was  in  a  sense  only  continuing  to  advance  the  cause  that  he  had 
striven  to  promote  as  a  persecutor,  only  now  it  is  Judaism  sublimated 
and  freed  from  its  hteralism  and  exclusiveness.  Thus  primitive 
Christianity  was  Judaism  resurrected  and  transformed,  re-asserting 
its  old  faith  in  the  Covenant,  but  extending  its  benefits  to  the  elect 
among  the  gentiles,  as  indeed  had  to  be  done  because  so  few  within 
the  old  pale  had  penetration  enough  to  see  the  old  in  its  transfigured 
new  form.    Thus  the  heart  and  soul  of  the  old  Hebrew  dispensation 


JESUS'  ESCHATOLOGY  411 

went  over  into  the  new,  leaving  the  remainder  to  lapse  to  still  lower 
stages  of  formalism,  literalism,  and  religious  materialism,  until  it 
became  little  more  than  a  cast  or  husk  from  which  Hfe  had  departed. 

Thus  Jesus  did  come  back,  and  speedily,  before  the  Gospels  were 
written,  not  as  he  expected  but  more  effectively.  The  lurid  imagery 
of  his  eschatology  faded.  Wherever  it  has  had  recrudescence  in  fanatic 
texts  later,  it  has  been  rank  and  lush  for  a  season,  but  has  soon  proven 
to  be  only  a  deciduous  foliage.  It  left  as  its  far  more  precious  and 
perennial  result  a  futuristic  attitude  of  soul  inspired  by  hope  for  both 
the  individual  and  the  race.  It  loosened  and  enriched  the  soil  for  all 
conceptions  of  progress,  created  ideals  of  evolution,  filled  men  with  the 
buoyant  sense  that  the  best  things  have  not  happened  yet,  gave  am- 
bition, made  the  old  narrow  prophetism  a  diffusive  power,  and  gave  a 
courage  and  hope  that  enabled  the  human  race  to  endure  the  tragedy 
of  the  fall  of  the  old  states,  cultures,  and  civilizations.  Much  of  this 
general  new  courageousness,  perhaps  too  much  of  it,  went  over  into  the 
specific  form  of  a  belief  in  personal  immortality.  If  this  belief  often 
tended  to  be  a  fetishistic  form  of  the  great  new  wave  of  futurism,  so 
that  the  impulses  to  reform  this  world  were  weakened,  it  nevertheless 
conserved  a  precious  thing  through  ages  so  troubled  that  had  it  been 
only  socially  conceived  it  would  have  been  utterly  lost.  The  Church 
was  the  external  form  which  the  new  futurism  took  on  in  its  immanent 
mundane  sphere,  always  correlated  with  the  thought-forms  of  a  trans- 
cendental heavenly  future.  The  hope  and  the  treasure  of  falling 
States  went  over  to  it.  But  for  it  the  world  might  have  despaired. 
The  Kingdom  it  conceived  could  only  have  its  symbol  or  preparatory 
school  on  this  earth;  but  this  helped  men  to  look  away  from  and  beyond 
the  present  at  times  and  places,  or  in  circumstances  when  they  needed 
to  do  so,  if  they  were  not  to  lose  hope.  On  the  eschatological  theory 
everything  Jesus  and  his  followers  taught  focussed  on  some  mood  and 
tense  of  the  smgle  word — hope.  Everything  the  Christian  says  is  a 
variation  on  this  theme,  and  all  he  does  is  to  sustain  and  increase  it. 
If  this  view  has  at  last  really  found  the  true  Jesus  unknown  even  to  the 
Evangelists  his  message  to  us  is  that,  instead  of  being  too  absorbed  in 
the  past  or  even  in  the  here  and  now,  our  chief  endeavour  must  be  to 
construe  the  future.  It  follows,  of  course,  since  this  is  so  uncertain 
as  to  admit  of  countless  constructions,  that  we  shall  make  mistakes  as 
Jesus  did  in  his  plan,  and  so  change  to  a  second;  nor  is  this  any  ground 


412  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

of  disparagement,  because  the  future  must  ever  be  recast.  It  is 
rather  to  his  glory  that  he  could  change  and  readjust  to  new  insights, 
for  all  interested  in  the  future  must  ever  do  this.  It  is  less  to  his  credit, 
however,  that  he  died  in  despair  because  he  realized  that  his  second 
plan  had  miscarried.  A  third,  fourth,  or  series  of  other  programs 
would  surely  have  included  among  them  that  of  waiting,  but  this  his 
impetuous  soul  could  not  do.  Perhaps  if  he  had  not  followed  the  issue 
to  a  fatal  termination,  but  had  lived  on  to  a  good  old  age,  he  would 
have  come  to  accept  some  other  and  more  deliberate  program  for  the 
advent  of  the  Kingdom,  and  have  realized  that  the  essential  thing  was 
that  it  would  and  must  come  at  some  dateless  and  perhaps  very  remote 
time,  whether  suddenly  or  gradually,  and  that  constant  expectant 
tension  with  variable  direction  of  orientation  to  it  was  the  main  thing. 
The  eschatological  view  certainly  also  makes  Jesus  seem  far  more 
historic,  because  the  issues  involved  are  so  vital  and  the  psychic 
processes  which  concern  us  here  are  so  true,  to  the  nature  of  the  soul, 
although  nearly  all  the  phenomena  are  those  of  unusual  altitude.  Al- 
though the  whole  is  entirely  without  precedent,  the  items  of  which  it 
is  composed  have,  some  of  them,  innumerable  analogies  and  parallels 
in  human  histor}^  and  experience.  Here  they  are  all  summated  and 
synthetized,  and  to  re-realize  the  whole  Gospel  story  from  this  new 
standpoint  exalts  the  soul,  augments  its  energies,  gives  new  immunity 
against  being  ensnared  in  narrow  and  partial  views,  tends  to  purge 
many  imperfections,  makes  the  central  figure  of  the  New  Testament 
nearer,  more  attractive,  imposing,  and,  in  a  word,  more  sublime  and 
Godlike  in  its  solitary  effort  to  find  and  open  a  new  and  true  way  of 
salvation  for  man. 

Thus  in  Jesus  the  futurism  of  all  the  prophets  culminated.  The 
protensive  diathesis  of  youth,  of  ascendent  races;  the  mood  of  dawn 
and  springtide,  of  abounding  vitality  and  health  or  wholeness,  aggres- 
sive energy,  self-affirmation;  the  excelsior  spirit  of  ambition;  the  zeal 
that  would  reform  society  and  convert  the  world;  the  feeling  that  man 
as  he  is  is  but  the  embryo  of  what  he  is  to  become  as  superman ;  the 
impulse  that  would  intensify  the  present  because  it  is  parturient  of  a 
far  greater  and  better  age,  that  believes  in  a  golden  age  but  conceives 
it  as  future  rather  than  as  past;  the  religion  of  eugenics,  which  holds 
that  the  present  generation  should  live  solely  in  the  interests  of  the 
countless  generations  to  be  born  from  it,  and  to  which  the  duty  of  all 


JESUS'  ESCHATOLOGY  413 

duties  is  to  transmit  the  torch  of  Hfe  undimined  and  burning  ever 
brighter;  the  mania  for  progress  and  the  phobia  of  stagnation  or  con- 
servatism; the  supreme  will  to  serve  and  live  for  a  long  Hne  of  posterity 
rather  than  to  revere  ancestors;  the  feehng  that  great  destinies  depend 
upon  present  decisions— all  these  are  distinctively  Christian  in  their 
psychogenesis.  Their  organ  is  faith;  their  Einstellung  or  attitude  is 
something  which  Jesus,  if  he  did  not  bring  it  into  the  world,  supremely 
illustrates.  It  calls  to  the  world  to  think  more  in  the  future  tense, 
and  it  is  this  that  reanimates  and  starts  on  the  upward  track  all  races 
and  individuals  that  have  adopted  the  Christian  viewpoint.  If  Jesus 
lost  the  true  temporal  perspective  of  the  Kingdom  and  thought  the 
righteous  would  inherit  the  new  earth  at  once,  that  only  intensified 
this  Stellungsnahme  toward  the  hereafter.  It  is  precisely  this  that 
gives  us  the  new  key  by  which  psychology  is  now  able  to  unlock  the  very 
secret  soul  of  Jesus  himself,  which  has  never  been  understood  before, 
and  which  but  one  Christologist,  0.  Holtzmann,  has  ever  glimpsed, 
although  Schweitzer,  who  one  would  think  would  be  the  first  to  see, 
refuses  to  admit  it.  Living  as  Jesus  did  in  this  highly  wrought  state 
of  expectancy,  his  powers  were  subjected  to  the  greatest  stimulus  and 
strain  which  could  be  put  upon  them,  and  therefore,  though  not  an 
ecstatic  in  the  sense  Holtzmann  urges,  he  was  more  or  less  erethic,  more 
habitually  in  a  state  of  exaltation  or  second  breath,  illustrating  what 
we  now  term  "the  higher  powers  of  man."  This  tiptoe  or  superlative 
state  is  not  ecstasy  in  the  clinical  sense,  but  is  inebriation  with  great 
ideas  in  Plato's  sense.  In  this  temperament  inhibition  and  restraint 
have  less  power  to  fetter  the  soul,  and  so  it  is  more  unreserved  to  let 
itself  go  with  abandon  in  response  to  the  incitations  of  each  occasion. 
In  such  a  disposition  anger  can  blaze  forth  without  stint,  and  love 
and  devotion  are  no  less  unrepressed.  Fasting,  hardship,  heroism 
in  the  face  of  danger,  living  completely  for  one's  ideal,  moods  of  de- 
pression and  of  elevation,  may  all  go  to  the  Ihnit.  Now  the  soul  is  the 
victim  of  hope,  now  of  despair,  and  each  in  turn  fills  the  whole  field  of 
consciousness  and  evicts  its  opposite.  Only  such  lives  can  exhaust 
the  possibiHties  of  individual,  and  in  a  sense  of  racial,  experience. 
Every  passing  movement  of  such  souls  is  prone  to  be  superlative. 
The  ordinary  repressions  that  cramp  and  warp  most  are  cast  to  the 
winds.  If  in  such  a  disposition  the  psychic  structure  is  sound  and  the 
life  pure,  with  no  dangerous  secrets  Hable  to  be  betrayed  because  there 


414  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

is  nothing  to  conceal,  there  is  no  thought  of  consistency,  the  fetish 
of  souls  that  feel  themselves  lacking  in  organic  unity  and  in  danger  of 
fission  or  dissolution  into  multiple  personaUties,  for  there  is  no  peril  in 
escaping  the  conventions,  whether  of  belief  or  conduct.  If  we  are  right 
in  claiming  for  Jesus  this  kind  of  character  we  can  understand  why  he 
seemed  so  many  different  sorts  of  persons  at  different  times,  and  also 
why  those  who  try  to  delineate  him  now  differ  so  widely.  The  har- 
mony of  his  powers  was  too  deep  to  be  disturbed  by  his  reactions  to 
different  sohcitations.  Such  characters  seem  very  pol>Tnorphic  to 
others,  but  they  exist  and  constitute  a  true  ethological  species.  They 
are  not  multipersonal  in  a  pathological  sense,  and  the  point  of  our  con- 
tention is  that  while  they  do  bear  a  very  close  resemblance  to  fictive 
personaUties  that  are  the  product  of  syncretism,  they  are  not  so,  but 
are  in  a  sense  more  real  than  any  other  type.  In  fact,  only  in  free 
energetic  souls  keyed  to  a  constant  high  pitch,  as  Jesus  was  by  his 
eschatological  concepts  of  the  world  and  his  view  of  his  own  functions, 
can  we  have  the  generic  type  of  individual.  In  such  the  race  finds 
fullest  expression  in  the  life  of  the  individual.  This  type  of  person 
can  best  represent  in  his  own  life  that  of  the  race,  which  should  find 
ample  expression  in  each.  Thus  the  eschatological  concepts  and  an 
erethic  disposition  would  seem  almost  inseparable,  each  as  cause  and 
effect  of  the  other.  To  the  amplification  and  the  proof  of  this  position 
we  shall  return  later. 

Consciousness  also  gave  an  unprecedented  reinforcement  to  the 
moral  sense.  In  the  impending  world-assize  not  only  outer  but  inner 
iniquity  meets  an  awful  doom,  and  goodness  will  have  its  glorious  re- 
ward. Friends  will  be  separated  and  consigned  to  the  most  opposite 
fates.  The  age  of  concealment  and  procrastination  is  finished.  Con- 
version, not  merely  of  the  intellect  in  the  sense  of  Plato's  myth  of  the 
cave,  but  of  heart,  will,  and  the  conduct  of  Hfe,  is  imperative.  There 
is  no  escape  from  the  purgation  of  fire  save  by  repentance.  All  not 
found  fit  to  enter  the  heavenly  Kingdom  will  go  to  the  counter-kingdom 
of  Satan.  Man  is  at  the  cross-roads  and  must  choose,  for  there  is 
no  middle  course.  If  a  great  pestilence  were  to  come  and  men  had  to 
reconstruct  their  diet  and  regimen,  the  principles  of  personal  and  pub- 
lic hygiene  would  be  reinforced  by  all  the  instincts  of  self-preservation. 
Thus  Jesus'  eschatology  reinforced  moral  hygiene,  and  thus  his  fu- 
turism made  the  world  more  keenly  conscious  of  sin  than  ever  before. 


JESUS'  ESCHATOLOGY  415 

This  construed  the  world  as  through  and  through  moral,  with  ethical 
laws  supreme,  estabhshed  a  new  and  stronger  association  between 
evil-doing  and  fear,  which  had  thus  a  new  deterrent  if  not  preventive 
power.  The  age-long  sin  scare  which  eschatology  threw  into  the  souls 
of  men  was  a  drastic  moral  pedagogy,  and  has  left  some  scars,  as  seen  in 
the  ethically  disequilibrated,  but  on  the  whole  it  was  the  most  benef- 
icent and  efficient  autotherapy  Mansoul  has  ever  brought  upon  itself, 
and  saved  the  race  from  being  submerged  in  the  flood  of  putrid  cor- 
ruption which  followed  the  collapse  of  the  old  civilizations  under  the 
successive  waves  of  barbaric  invasion.  Hell,^  the  psychology  of  which 
we  are  just  beginning  to  understand  aright,  became  ver>'  real  and  near, 
cuhninating  in  Dante,  and  death  became  a  veritable  muse  and  a  s)nii- 
bol  of  the  yet  more  dreadful  second  death.  Thanatophobia^  and 
gennaphobia  were  harnessed  up  with  harmatophobia.  It  is  the  puny 
fashion  of  our  age  to  distrust  fear  cures,  and,  indeed,  they  are  always 
dangerous  to  weaklings,  but  we  forget  that  fear  is  the  beginning  of 
wisdom,  and  that  those  who  have  feared  wisely  and  well  have  inherited 
the  earth;  for  fear  is  only  the  anticipation  of  pain.  We  forget  that 
fear  of  disease  created  m.edicine  and  hygiene;  that  fear  of  death  has 
been  the  chief  factor  in  the  evolution  of  the  doctrine  of  immortaUty 
as  compensation  for  mortahty;  that  social  and  poHtical  institutions 
evolve  from  fear  of  anarchy;  that  the  Church,  insurance,  and  even 
science,  that  is  making  man  the  master  instead  of  the  slave  of  nature, 
are  in  no  small  degree  products  of  fear;  and  that  one  of  the  chief  spurs 
of  ambition  to  make  the  most  and  best  of  our  individual  lives  springs 
from  the  fear  of  inferiority  or  mediocrity.  To  this  emotion  eschatology 
made  the  strongest  of  all  possible  appeals,  and  Christian  virtue  owes 
it  a  debt  it  can  never  estimate. 

Was  the  real  historic  Jesus,  as  the  psychologist  may  now  conceive 
him  in  the  new  light  of  modern  liberal  studies,  a  truly  great  man? 
And  if  so  how  great  was  he,  and  wherein  consisted  his  superiority? 
Paidologists  are  now  learning  how  hard  it  is  to  grade  intelligence  even 
in  children  and  to  estabHsh  norms  and  standards  by  which  to  distin- 
guish the  normal  from  the  subnormal.  Halls  of  fame,  learned  academies, 
"Who's  Who,"  industrial  corporations,  efficiency  experts,  anthro- 
pologists, psychologists,  characterologists,  eugenists,  and  the  psychol- 

'C.  F.  Sparkman:  "Satan  and  His  Ancestors."    Jour.  Relig.  Psychol.,  1912,  vol.  s,  pp.  sa-8s.  and  163-194.    F.  T. 
HaU:  "The  Pedigree  of  the  DevU."    Also  Tompson,  i883»,p.  256. 

'G.  Stanley  Hall:  "Thanatophobia  and  Immortality."    Am.  Jour.  Psychol.,  1915,  vol.  26,  pp.  550-613. 


4i6  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

ogists  of  genius  and  talent  and  the  analyzers  of  the  biographies  of  great 
men,  are  all  seeking  to  assort  and  grade  the  human  qualities  that  make 
up  the  few  personalities  that  tower  highest  above  the  rank  and  file 
of  mankind.  We  have  already  from  several  sources  attempts  to  fore- 
cast the  overman  of  the  future,  from  Aristotle's  magnanimous  man,  the 
true  aristocrat,  and  the  Stoic  sage,  down  to  Zarathustra. 

What  is  the  place  of  Jesus  amidst  all  these  modern  criteria  and 
evaluations  of  men?  The  old  diploma  of  greatness  was  diianitization, 
and  of  no  one  has  this  been  more  persistently  urged.  This  old  pedestal 
or  supreme  encomium,  despite  the  unanimity  of  the  consensus  of  the 
past,  no  longer  suffices,  at  least  for  many.  Hegel  said  in  substance 
that  the  great  were  those  who  forced  mankind  to  discuss  and  explain 
them  until  different  groups  of  interpreters  arose  and  contended  with 
one  another.  This  process  began  for  Jesus  with  the  authors  of  the  epis- 
tles and  Gospels,  or  before,  and  for  two  millennia  he  has  been  more 
studied,  written,  and  thought  of  than  any  other  person  in  history. 
But  fame  alone  is  not  a  test  of  true  inner  greatness.  Carlyle  said  great 
men  are  those  who  change  the  current  of  history.  Jesus  certainly 
marked  the  dawn  of  our  new  era.  Emerson  stressed  the  opening  of 
new  culture  fields  and  trends,  and  measured  on  this  scale  Jesus  cer- 
tainly towers  above  all  others.  But  the  question  still  remains  how 
much  of  the  movement  that  bears  his  name  was  his  own  personal  work, 
and  whether  but  for  his  successors  an}^  such  institution  as  the  Church 
would  have  arisen,  for  we  are  still  unable  to  enucleate  v/ith  confidence 
just  what  Jesus  was,  did,  and  said.  Since  Galton,^  heredity  has  been 
stressed,  and  we  have  voluminous  if  inconclusive  discussions  of  the 
relative  value  of  inheritance  and  environment.  Reibmayer-  thinks 
that  talent  and  genius  are  more  commonly  products  of  settled  but  sim- 
ple fife  with  agriculture  and  trade,  but  that  talent  is  more  prone  to 
spring  from  inbreeding  where  parents  differ  little,  while  genius  is  more 
often  a  product  of  cross-breeding  between  parents  of  different  families, 
stations,  or  even  races.  How  alert  the  earliest  followers  of  Jesus  were 
to  the  necessity  of  giving  him  the  best  of  pedigrees  by  making  him  at 
once  the  son  of  David  and  of  God,  and  by  beatifying  his  mother,  we 
saw  in  Chapter  4.  Whatever  our  interpretation  of  the  earliest  records, 
there  is  not  only  no  indication  of  any  handicap  but  much  that  was 


"Gallon:  "Hereditary  Genius."  1892,  379  p. 

'"Entwicklungsgeschichte  des  Talents  und  Genies."    a  Bande,  1908.    See  esiwciaUy  Bd.  i,  S.  si3  et  seq. 


JESUS'  ESCHATOLOGY  417 

favourable  for  subsequent  greatness  in  both  his  ancestry  and  his  early- 
environment.  The  same  may  be  said  of  the  latter  if  we  agree  with 
Freudians,  who  deem  greatness  largely  due  to  infantile  experiences.  Joly/ 
Tiirck/  and  especially  Fischer,^  as  well  as  H.  ElKs*  and  many  others,  have 
attempted  to  define  both  the  conditions  and  the  very  many  and  com- 
plex characteristics  of  greatness,  which  Lombroso,^  Nordau^  and  their 
numerous  followers  always  think  tainted  with  insanity,  while  Hirsch^ 
seeks  to  trace  the  genesis  of  fame. 

(A)  Amidst  all  the  wide  diversity  of  opinion  in  literature  one 
point  of  unanimity  that  stands  out,  perhaps  before  all  others,  and  one 
very  significant  for  the  characterization  of  Jesus,  is  that  greatness  in- 
volves the  union  of  the  most  opposite  qualities.  The  great  man  must 
be  at  once  very  receptive  and  very  active.  He  must  be  passive  and 
docile  and  accept  facts  as  they  are,  even  if  it  has  to  be  with  stoicism 
and  resignation.  He  must  yield  to  present  reaHty  with  utter  acquies- 
cence until  he  grasps  it  completely,  not  fly  from  or  ignore  it  because  it 
is  disagreeable  to  face  if  it  goes  counter  to  all  his  wishes  and  prejudices. 
He  must  understand  the  misunderstandings  of  his  enemies,  and  antici- 
pate the  worst  that  they  can  say  or  do.  He  must  appreciate  obstacles 
and  difficulties  at  their  full  value.  He  must  be  able  to  see  and  even 
take  the  other  side  temporarily  and  with  Einjiihlimg.  He  must  take 
pleasure  in  the  range  of  his  sympathies  and,  if  need  be,  "accept  the 
inevitable  with  joy  "  in  the  sense  of  Seneca.  But  on  the  other  hand,  this 
consummation  of  the  noetic  must  not  check  but  rather  excite  a  counter- 
conative  reaction  if  he  is  sure  he  is  right.  Knowing  what  he  is  up 
against,  he  must  not  lie  down  or  quit,  but  cling  to  his  purpose  tena- 
ciously with  the  utmost  courage  and  perseverance.  He  must  glory  in 
conflict,  love  danger,  enjoy  the  maximum  of  effort  and  suffering,  and  if 
things  are  not  according  to  his  will  must  make  them  so.  He  must 
enlist  for  this  purpose  every  resource  he  can  summon,  within  or  without, 
be  ready  constantly  to  modify,  if  necessary,  not  only  methods  but  his 
initial  impulsion,  and  must  continue  to  do  so  indefinitely  until  his  goal 
is  attained.     The  energy  of  his  aggressiveness  must  bend  other  wills. 


'"Psychoiogie  des  grandes  hommes."    Paris,  1883,  2S0  p. 

2"The  Man  of  Genius."    Scliwerin,  1914,  483  p. 

'"Der  Grossgeist  des  hochste  menschiicbe  Ideal."     igoS,  2S0  p. 

*"A  Study  of  British  Genius,"  1904,  300  p. 

^"L'homme  de  genie."    Paris,  18S9,  499  p. 

'"Degeneration."     7th  ed.    London,  1893,  560  p. 

'"Die  Genesis  des  Ruhmes."  1914,  285  p. 


4i8  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

beat  down  or  evade  all  opposition;  and  he  must  often  seem  relentless  if 
not  pitiless  in  this  work.  Most  of  the  world's  elite  are  great  either  in 
insight  or  in  action,  but  very  few  indeed  combine  the  two  in  due  pro- 
portion. Turck  and  the  Freudians  best  describe  this  amphibole,  and 
rehgionists,  e.  g.,  Cromwell  and  his  followers  so  far  as  they  were  ab- 
jectly passive  toward  God  and  imperative  and  domineering  toward  the 
world,  best  illustrate  it.  In  this  respect  of  course  Jesus  is  supreme. 
He,  however,  found  it  hard  to  accept  the  god  of  things  as  they  are, 
although  he  went  to  the  limit  of  voluntarily  meeting  death.  So  intent 
was  he  upon  his  own  supreme  affirmation  of  will  in  establishing  the 
Kingdom,  that  he  perhaps  fell  short  of  appreciating  the  strength  of  the 
opposition,  unless,  of  course,  he  really  meant  to  die  as  he  did,  and  trust 
all  to  the  reaction  thus  provoked.  In  that  case  he  measures  up  to  the 
criterion  more  than  any  other.  Knowing  Satan  and  all  the  mundane 
powers  arrayed  against  him  for  all  they  were  and  could  do,  he  never- 
theless challenged  and  overcame  them.  Jesus  was  not  one  whose 
intellect  paralyzed  his  wall,  like  Hamlet,  or  perverted  it,  like  Faust. 
Nor  was  he  a  great  executive  of  ill-laid  plans,  or  a  hero  of  a  mistaken 
cause  or  of  a  good  one  foolishly  served.  He  was  an  expert  in  both  the 
depth  and  truth  of  his  reUgious  insights.  The  work  he  organized, 
considering  the  human  material  he  had  to  deal  with  and  the  short  time 
he  beheved  was  left  before  the  consummation  of  the  existing  order  of 
things,  could  hardly  have  been  improved  upon.  If,  however,  he  planned 
by  his  death  to  spur  others  to  carry  on  his  work  as  they  did,  his  mas- 
tery of  means  to  this  end  was  above  our  full  comprehension  even  yet, 
for  not  only  was  his  will  power  Stoic  and  even  Promethean,  but  his 
sagacity  and  foresight  remain  in  a  class  by  themselves.  H.  Bushnell^ 
thought  him  "a  great  social  and  reHgious  arcliitect  with  a  plan  em- 
bracing ages,"  and  that  his  work  of  estabUshing  the  Kingdom,  humanly 
impossible,  was  the  chief  proof  that  he  was  more  than  a  man.  Of  the 
two  primitive  documents  which  so  many  critics  now  believe  to  have 
been  the  precursors  of  our  Gospels,  the  Ur-Markus  and  the  logia, 
the  former  was  mainly  concerned  with  what  Jesus  did  and  the  latter  with 
what  he  taught,  thought,  or  said,  as  if  the  first  two  groups  of  his  fol- 
lowers and  the  first  two  lines  of  tradition,  one  stressing  his  practice  and 
the  other  his  theory  of  life,  were  for  a  time  rival  parties,  perhaps,  which 
our  Gospels  strove  to  synthetize.     So,  in  the  history  of  theology,  we 

>"The  Character  of  Jesus."     New  York,  1895. 


JESUS'  ESCHATOLOGY  419 

find  interest  now  in  Christ's  work  and  now  in  his  words  paramount. 
Are  we  not  thus  justified  in  inferring  a  high  and  a  uniquely  well- 
balanced  development  of  both  will  and  intellect  in  Jesus? 

(B)  Another  trait  always  prominent  in  the  characterization  of 
great  men,  and  illustrated  in  the  hundreds  of  biographies  that  have 
lately  been  so  carefully  rummaged  in  quest  of  the  secret  of  eminence,  is 
that  they  have  exceptional  experience  with  both  the  extremes  of  plea- 
sure and  pain.  They  both  suffer  and  enjoy  keenly,  and  fate  often  leads 
them  to  the  superlative  degree  of  both.  The  power  to  respond  to  one 
does  not  destroy,  but  heightens,  the  power  of  response  to  the  other. 
Such  men  can  be  afficted  and  even  long  depressed  without  setthng 
into  melancholia,  and  can  exult  with  euphoria  and  enjoy  all  the  real 
pleasures  of  life  without  abnormal  exaltation.  Pleasure  and  pain  are 
the  two  poles  of  experience,  the  sovereign  motives  and  masters  of  life, 
which  is  made  up  of  efforts  to  enlarge  the  field  of  the  former  and  to  reduce 
that  of  the  latter.  Too  much  as  well  as  too  little  of  either  dwarfs, 
arrests,  or  perverts,  just  as  children  need  both  to  laugh  and  to  cry. 
This  power  of  response  to  either,  together  with  rebound  and  resilience 
between  the  optimistic  and  the  pessimistic  experiences  and  interpreta- 
tions of  life,  exploring  each  to  its  Hmit  without  becoming  its  captive, 
gives  the  soul  range,  richness,  variety;  and  not  only  greatness  but 
sanity  depends  upon  this  elasticity,  for  most  forms  of  alienation  begin 
in  psychalgia  or  hypereuphoria.  Every  novel  or  drama  is  an  exercise 
in  alternations  between  the  tension  of  imminent  danger  and  the  re- 
laxation of  the  happy  ending,  and  this  is  a  very  potent  preventive  and 
psychotherapy  in  securing  to  the  mind  unity  and  safeguarding  it 
against  danger  of  fission.  All  fife  is  cadenced  between  work  and  play, 
striving  and  recreation,  failure  and  success,  defeats  and  victories,  and 
the  great  soul  hungers  for  both,  loves  risks  and  hardships  as  well  as 
enjoyments.  Small  men  gravitate  predominantly  toward  the  one  or 
the  other,  and  make  but  short,  infrequent,  and  timid  excursions  over 
into  the  domain  of  the  other. 

How  does  Jesus  as  we  now  understand  him  measure  up  on  this 
standard?  Renan,  Haase,  and  Keim  long  ago  pointed  out  his  aversion 
to  asceticism,  his  love  of  the  joys  of  life,  and  even  Strauss  spoke  of  his 
gentle  Heiterkeit.  In  1876  A.  Wiinsche  pubhshed  his  "Der  lebensfreu- 
dige  Jesu,"  representing  him  as  exultant,  triumphant,  and  prone  to 
indulge  in  all  innocent  joys  of  Hfe,  and  thrilled  with  success.     He  sought 


420  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

to  "  deliver  the  figure  of  Jesus  from  the  unhistorical  shadows  in  which  it 
has  lain,  and  set  it  in  the  sunshine  where  it  belongs."  Six  years  earUer, 
however,  in  1870,  Wiinsche  had  published  his  ''Die  Leiden  des 
Messias"  which  represents  Jesus  as  the  man  of  sorrows  and  the  suffer- 
ing serA'ant  of  Yahveh,  as  dark  a  picture  as  the  former  was  a  bright  one, 
leaving  us  a  little  uncertain  how  much  of  the  difference  between  these 
two  books  was  due  to  a  deep  change  of  conviction  on  the  author's  part 
or  to  a  mere  change  of  attitude  and  theme.  Zangwill  describes  Jesus 
not  as  a  "tortured  God"  but  as  a  "joyous  comrade."  Dawson  says  of 
Christ,  "He  became  the  incarnation  of  the  spirit  of  joy,  the  symbol  of 
the  bliss  of  life,"  and  "Christ's  gracious  gaiety  of  heart  proved  conta- 
gious," etc.^  Recent  works  still  more  popular  show  the  same  tendency 
to  react  from  the  Puritan  rancour  against  happiness.  R.  Law^  has  a 
chapter  each  upon  his  joy  and  his  geniality.  A.  Whyte,^  in  describing 
the  thirty-three  dramatis  personae  in  the  New  Testament,  gives  a  some- 
what humorous  turn  to  the  accounts  of  the  enemy  who  sowed  tares  by 
night,  the  man  who  sowed  a  grain  of  mustard  seed,  the  one  who  found 
a  great  treasure  in  the  field,  the  wedding  guest  in  unfitting  costume, 
and  the  children  dancing  in  the  market  place.  G.  W.  Buckley^  goes 
still  further  in  his  attempt  to  "resurrect  Jesus  from  theology  and 
humanize  him."  He  urges  that  Jesus  had  a  keen  sense  of  the  comedy 
of  life;  that  he  admired  the  brilliant  repartee  of  the  Canaanite  woman  to 
his  saying  that  it  was  not  meet  to  give  the  children's  bread  to  the  dogs, 
to  which  she  retorted  that  the  dogs  might  eat  the  crumbs.  It  was 
really  not  her  faith  but  her  wit  and  humour  which  made  him  yield. 
The  new  piece  in  the  old  garment  describes  a  comic  thing.  So  does 
the  story  of  the  man  waking  his  neighbour  because  he  has  a  hungry 
guest;  of  the  judge  who  yielded  because  he  feared  the  woman's  con- 
tinual coming;  the  saying  that  no  one  can  serve  two  masters;  the  asking 
bread  and  giving  a  stone;  the  woman  who  rejoiced  over  the  finding  of  a 
penny.  These  to  Buckley  are  "realistic,  palpable  hits."  He  sees 
humour,  too,  in  the  story  of  the  foolish  virgins.  This  sense  of  humour 
made  the  common  people  hear  him  gladly.  The  stupidity  and  faux  pas 
of  the  disciples,  who  understood  him  as  little  as  Goethe's  Wagner  under- 
stood Faust;  the  address  to  the  soul,  "Thou  hast  much  goods  laid  up," 


•See  Peabody's  "Jesus  and  the  Christian  Character."     igos,  48  p. 
*"Thc  Emotions  of  Jesus."     1915,  154  p. 
•"Bible  Characters;  Our  Lord's  Character."    Chicago,  311  p. 
*"The  \Vit  and  Wisdom  of  Jesus."    Boston,  1901,  213  p. 


JESUS'  ESCHATOLOGY  421 

which  suggests  Holbein's  "  Dance  of  Death";  the  admonition  not  to  sit 
in  the  chief  seat  at  a  feast,  or  ask  to  dinner  only  those  who  will  ask  you 
to  dine  in  turn;  these  and  the  many  pithy  epigrammatic  sayings  that 
the  world  knows  by  heart  show  that  Jesus  was  a  great  conversationalist, 
as  witty  as  he  was  wise;  that  he  was  as  ready  with  pleasantry,  satire, 
ridicule,  and  irony  as  he  was  with  invectives.  Perhaps  no  one  goes 
quite  so  far  as  Bousset^  in  making  the  joy  of  life  the  chief  trait  of  Jesus. 

Most  now  thinli  the  first  part  of  Jesus'  career  more  joyous  and  the 
last  part  more  sad.  If  we  are  told  that  he  wept,  but  not  that  he 
laughed,  as  if,  like  Chesterfield,  he  was  one  of  Sully's^  misogelasts 
or  laughter-haters  or  phobiacs  (and  no  artist  ever  yet  dared  to  make 
him  smile),  he  must  nevertheless  have  had  sources  and  times  of  ecstatic 
joy  in  communion  with  God,  made  Eureka  discoveries  of  new  insights, 
felt  the  satisfaction  of  attaining  ineluctable  certainties  where  others 
wandered  in  doubt. 

But  whatever  was  the  case  with  Jesus'  own  experiences,  his  imme- 
diate followers,  between  the  time  he  died  the  most  disgraceful  of  deaths 
and  his  body  was  sealed  in  the  tomb  or  lost  and  their  full  conviction 
that  he  had  risen  and  ascended,  passed  from  the  nadir  of  despair  to 
the  zenith  of  exaltation  at  Pentecost.  Their  spirits,  at  least  meta- 
phorically, passed  through  hell  and  up  to  heaven.  The  story  of  the 
cross  and  its  sequel  is  the  world's  masterpiece  of  pathos  and  of  triumph; 
and  this  great  algedonic  ebb  and  fiow  constitute  the  world's  chief 
autotherapy,  its  immunity-bath  against  being  finally  overwhelmed 
by  pain  and  disaster  on  the  one  hand,  or  on  the  other,  by  intoxication 
with  inebriating  joy  because  the  king  of  terrors  has  been  overcome. 
Thus  they  could  look  death  in  the  face  and  defy  him  to  do  his  worst, 
as  countless  martyrs  did  in  the  nine  persecutions  that  followed.  (See 
the  chapter  on  the  Death  and  Resurrection.)  In  fact,  the  very  core  of 
Christianity  consists  in  a  discipline  in  meeting  pleasure  and  pain, 
without  going  through  which  adolescence,  the  golden  period  of  life,  is 
incomplete  and  suffers  arrest,  so  that  the  novitiate  to  life  is  unprepared 
to  meet  it,  and  his  poise  and  equilibrium  between  the  two  chief  dangers 
and  opportunities  remain  unsafeguarded.  (See  my  "Adolescence," 
Vol.  2,  chapter  14,  "Adolescent  Psychology  of  Conversion. ") 

(C)  All  characterizations  of  greatness  specify  alternations  between 


i"Jesu  Predigt  m  ihrem  Gegensatz  zum  Judentum."    1892,  130  p. 
'See  his  "Essay  on  Laughter."    1902,  441  p. 


422  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

solitude  and  society,  or  between  subjective  and  objective  life.  The 
Catholic  Church  has  always  found  a  soul-cure  in  the  "retreat." 
Modern  morahsts,  especially  the  French  ethical  writers  for  young 
people,  emphasize  a  silent  hour  for  meditation  or  introspection.^  The 
psycholog}^  of  solitude  shows  its  high  ethical  value  for  those  who  are 
great  enough  to  avoid  its  dangers.^  As  MacNish  shows,  solitude 
reinforces  heredity;  society  and  the  objective  Hfe  make  for  individual 
adaptation  to  the  environment.  The  desert,  says  Renan  in  substance, 
perhaps  even  more  than  the  mountain,  has  always  been  the  stronghold 
of  great  Semitic  spirits  and  the  cradle  of  great  ideas.  Aloneness 
teaches  self-knowledge,  self-control,  and  reverence  for  inner  oracles. 
With  social  restraints  and  distractions  removed,  we  are  free  to  be  and 
to  face  ourselves.  We  get  close  to  nature  and  to  God.  Hermits,  ere- 
mites, cloistered  monks,  entertain  and  reinforce  their  own  personaHties 
and  incubate  the  supreme  problems  of  life  and  death,  good,  evil,  des- 
tiny, and  providence.  Turck  and  Fischer  point  out  how  often  the  very 
greatest  men  even  outside  the  Church  remain  cehbate,  because  their 
affections  are  fixed  on  larger  interests  than  those  of  the  family,  although 
perhaps  maintaining  ideal  relations  to  the  other  sex,  as  Wiinsche 
thinks  Jesus  did,^  pointing  out  the  immense  service  women  rendered 
to  the  Church  in  apostolic  and  patristic  times.  Solitude,  too,  gives 
true  perspective,  and  inclines  religious  minds  to  prayer.  Jesus  knew 
and  used  this  resource  to  an  unusual  extent  during  all  his  career,  from 
the  flight  into  the  mlderness  in  order  to  muse  on  the  staggering  sug- 
gestions that  came  to  him  at  the  baptism,  to  Gethsemane.  He  often 
took  refuge  from  the  multitude,  escaped  to  northern  Galilee  when  the 
disciples  were  absent  on  their  first  missionary  journey,  and  his  habit 
was  not  to  fly  from  but  to  prepare  for  difficult  emergencies.  Some 
writers  make  much  of  the  secret  Hfe  of  Jesus,  and  OUivier'*  believes  that 
in  his  infancy  and  youth  he  was  much  alone,  partly  on  account  of  the 
Herodian  slaughter  of  so  many  near  his  own  age.  Although  he  was  so 
above  those  in  his  entourage  that  he  must  have  felt  isolated  in  their  pres- 
ence, he  nevertheless  loved  their  companionship,  had  his  favourites  and 
intimates,  and  has  even  been  described  as  a  "brilliant  dialectician." 
As  one  who  loved  to  sharpen  wits  by  dialogue  and  discussion  in  the 


'See  my  "Educational  Problems,"  Vol.  i,  chap,  j,  on  "Moral  Education,"  passim. 

-  Small:  "On  Some  Psychical  Relations  of  Society  and  Solitude."     Ped.  Sem.,  Apr.,  1900.  vol,  7,  pp.  13-69. 

'"Jesu  in  seiner  Stellung  an  die  Frauen."     187J,  146  p. 

•"La  vie  cachfe  de  Jesu."    Paris,  1904,  465  p, 


JESUS'  ESCHATOLOGY  423 

sense  in  which  Plato  commends  this  method  of  investigation,  and  took 
pleasure  in  discourse  with  strangers,  both  men  and  women,  although  he 
preferred  as  a  teacher  to  communicate  his  own  and  God's  truth,  he  still 
took  a  true  and  pedagogic  pleasure  in  answering  questions  and  meeting 
objections.  His  preparation  was  not  that  of  a  reader,  as  Plato  re- 
proached Aristotle  with  being,  but,  as  Plato  claimed  for  himself,  he 
sought  inner  insights  and  was  a  true  autodidact.  Perhaps  he  did  feel 
the  inspiration  of  attentive  crowds,  even  though  he  never  gave  the  set 
sermon  on  the  mount.  He  certainly  was  a  master  opportunist  in  seiz- 
ing on  every  occasion,  as  it  arose,  to  impart  his  precepts,  and  was  in  vital 
rapport  with  both  the  individuals  and  the  groups  he  met,  and  his  King- 
dom required  every  member  of  it  to  be  an  ideal  socius,  as  Christian 
socialism  in  both  its  narrower  and  larger  sense  is  now  abundantly  tell- 
ing us.  Both  the  agapce  and  the  institution  of  the  supper  cement  the 
closest  of  all  bonds  between  men,  as  the  Fourth  Gospel  shows  us,  closer 
than  love  between  the  sexes.  Nothing  is  more  contagious  than  reli- 
gious emotion. 

(D)  Great  men  often  believe  themselves  inwardly  influenced  by 
some  power  above  themselves.  This  power  has  been  very  diversely 
interpreted  and  has  been  assigned  the  most  diverse  functions.  Muses, 
guardian  angels,  individual  guiding  spirits,  good  and  bad,  fates,  destiny, 
fortune,  luck,  gorus,  familiar  spirits,  etc.,  are  all  different  names  for  it, 
and  it  is  thought  sometimes  to  enter  and  control  individuals  until  they 
seem  possessed  as  by  alien  personalities.  Many  feel  themselves  caught 
up  or  borne  along  by  a  momentum  not  at  their  own  command.-  If 
these  phenomena  are  predominantly  intellectual  they  are  often  con- 
ceived as  inspiration  or  revelation;  if  mainly  emotional,  as  ecstasy.  If 
the  synergy  of  the  afflatus  is  chiefly  conative  it  may  be  thought  a 
categorical  reinforcement  of  duty  or  a  specifically  decreed  commission, 
command,  or  calling  from  on  high  which,  like  Luther,  they  cannot  re- 
sist. It  may  only  gently  dissuade,  hke  Socrates'  daimon,  or  issue 
peremptory  positive  commands  in  an  hallucinated  voice.  Its  language 
may  be  vision  or  the  word  of  the  Lord  as  it  came  to  the  prophets. 
Sometimes  it  causes  rapt  trancoidal  states,  or  it  may  hyperenergize  the 
active,  efferent  tracts.  From  shamanism  and  witchcraft  to  the 
Convtdsiannaires  of  St.  Medard;  from  the  mantic  maenads  to  Shakers, 
Jumpers,  and  speakers  with  tongues,  we  now  know  that  it  is  only  some 
higher  potentialization  of  the  powers  of  the  individual.    Plato  de- 


424  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

scribed  two  kinds  of  delirium,  one  the  furoy  poeticus  that  inspired  great 
creative  works,  especially  in  the  domain  of  rehgion,  art,  and  Uterature, 
while  the  other  was  insanity.     Between  the  latter  and  genius,  especially 
since  Lelut,  Moreau,  and  Lombroso,  a  considerable  and  growing  litera- 
ture^ has  pointed  out  a  relation.     Whether  we  interpret  these  pheno- 
mena in  the  old  ways  as  visitations  from  without  or  on  high,  or,  as  we 
now  knov/  them  to  be,  as  incursions  into  consciousness  from  the  sub- 
liminal realm,  they  are  as  real  as  second  breath,  and  some  degree  of 
these  states  is  by  no  means  uncommon,  especially  in  vital  and  naive 
souls.    In  its  lesser  degrees  the  subject  feels  free  but  with  augmented 
power,  while  in  the  higher  degrees  of  it  he  feels  himself  a  passive  agent 
and  knows  no  more  than  do  onlookers  what  he  is  going  to  say,  see,  hear, 
or  do  next.     His  autistically  active  self  becomes  objective.     At  their 
best  these  erethic  states  are  simply  the  superfluity  of  vitality,  and  super- 
vene when  the  evolutionary  nisus  of  the  grovv^th  impulse  is  at  its  high- 
est tide;  for  evolution  is  the  only  true  revelation.     They  represent 
hfe  at  high  pressure  with  all  its  resources  rung  up,  mobilized,  and  in 
action.     Instead  of  doing  our  work  ourselves  and  with  effort,  we  stand 
off,  look  on,  and  see  it  done  for  us  by  some  unusual,  latent  power. 
Perhaps  we  accomplish  prodigies,  surprise  ourselves,  feel  that  we 
are  being  used  and  sv/ept  along.     Wliat  we  deemed  hard  is  easy,  and 
what  was  obscure  clears  up,  for  we  feel  clairvoyant,  clairaudient,  ob- 
sessed by  our  task,  and  borne  along  whether  we  will  or  not.     We  feel 
informed  by  a  higher  wisdom  than  our  own,  and  when  we  come  back 
to  ourselves  we  review  these  experiences  as  if  they  pertained  to  another, 
and  they  seem  new  to  us.     Of  course  experiences  that  follow  these 
formulae  occur  also  in  neurotics  and  psychotics,  and  the  alien  power  may 
be  complex  and  develop  into  what  seems  another  personality.     Fanat- 
icism, too,  might  be  characterized  in  some  of  the  same  terms,  so  that 
all  spirits  have  to  be  proved  and  tested.     Again,  the  ardour  of  the 
impulsion  may  be  so  great  or  long  continued  that  the  psychophysic 
system  of  its  victim  may  suffer  lesions  or  impairments;  but  to  be  able 
to  summon  such  reserves  in  emergencies  is  wondrous  gain,  and  it  is  no 
whit  more  difficult  to  distinguish  between  right  and  wrong  uses  or  re- 
sults of  these  experiences  than  betv/een  any  problems  of  morals  or  of 


>To  cite  a  few,  e.  r.,  see  P.  Radcstock:  "Genie  unci  Wahnsinn,"  1S84.  E.  Murisicr:  "Les  malaclics  du  sentiment 
rcligieux,"  iqoi.  J.  F.  Nisbet:  "The  Insanity  of  Genius,"  6tli  ed.,  1912.  J.  Morse:  "Pathological  Aspects  of  Religion," 
JQ06.  \V.  James:  "Varieties  of  Rclip;ious  Experience,"  especially  p.  77  et  seq.  See  also,  for  two  specific  aberrations 
icfcally  analyzed,  Pfister  on  "Glossalalie  und  Kr>-ptograph)e,"  in  Jahrb.f.  Psychoanalyse,  1912.  Vol.  3,  p.  427  and  7,^o 
et  seq. 


JESUS'  ESCHATOLOGY  425 

hygiene.  There  is  no  practical,  but  only  theoretic,  difficulty  of  defini- 
tion. The  acts  of  genius  itself  can  never  be  insane,  although  their 
sequelae  or  concomitants  as  found  in  pathological  natures  may  often  be 
so. 

From  this  viewpoint  Jesus  seems  the  Supreme  Master  of  all  who 
have  ever  known  or  utilized  consummately  the  higher  powers  of  man. 
Most  that  he  did  and  said  that  is  significant  was  with  some  degree  of 
such  affiatus.  God  and  the  Holy  Spirit  were  his  muse.  He  followed 
inner  oracles  that  he  thought  came  from  on  high  as  no  one  else  had  ever 
done,  and  it  is  small  matter  that  after  the  fashion  of  his  day  and  as  the 
masses  always  have  done  and  will  do,  he  objectified  these  impulsions.  In- 
deed, epistemologically  speaking,  no  one  can  know  what  he  does  not 
objectify.  He  projected  the  power  he  lived  by  into  heaven,  identified 
it  with  the  Hebrew  Yahveh,  and  whatever  may  be  said  in  this  case  of 
the  processes  of  the  intellect,  which  is  an  individual  and  relatively  acci- 
dental product,  the  heart  of  every  one  who  is  truly  religious  can  as  yet 
make  or  poetize  no  better  imagery  than  this,  for  feehng  must  always 
have  symbols  all  its  own.  The  psychology  of  Jesus  remains  to-day  by 
far  the  best  and  most  classic  field  in  which  to  study  all  such  processes, 
for  here  best  of  all  these  problems  are  illustrated.  Here  we  find  a  key 
to  the  understanding  of  his  character,  further  study  of  which  will  no 
doubt  long  continue,  as  it  has  already  so  well  begun  to  do,  to  make  his 
life  seem  more  real,  his  traits  more  intelligible,  and  his  biographies  more 
engaging. 

(E)  Comparative  studies  of  biographies,  and  especially  of  autobiog- 
raphies of  great  men,  show  as  another  attribute,  closely  allied  to  the 
above,  a  sense  that  they  are  not  merely  themselves  but  generic  or 
type-men,  or  that  in  them  the  species  is  especially  expressed  in  the 
individual.  They  feel  themselves  in  a  sense  the  embodiment  of  the 
soul  of  their  tribe,  race,  nation,  or  other  group;  the  bearer  of  its  ideals, 
its  leader  or  representative;  the  voice  through  which  the  wishes,  mil, 
needs  of  the  larger  social  group  are  expressed.  Some  think  the  roots  of 
this  trait  must  be  traced  to  totemism.  Its  perversions  tend  to  hyper- 
trophied  egoism,  but  its  ideal  is  to  subordinate,  if  not  evacuate,  the 
individual,  so  that  he  v/ho  best  illustrates  it  has  a  passion  to  renounce 
rather  than  to  acquire,  to  serve  rather  than  to  rule,  the  group  he  repre- 
sents. His  own  personal  proprium  shrivels  rather  than  expands;  he 
becomes  least,  not  greatest;  his  personal  fortunes,  or  even  his  life  or 


426  JESUS   IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

death,  are  inconsequential  compared  with  the  weal  or  woe  of  the  group 
interests  of  which  he  is  the  surrogate.  If  he  comes  to  supreme  power 
he  uses  it  humbly  as  a  charge  or  cause  to  which  he  is  entirely  subject. 
He  is  a  delegate  or  a  corporate  folk-soul,  and  to  live  to  himself  would  be 
treason  to  it.  If  he  is  utterly  devoted  to  the  common  welfare,  he  may 
legitimately  feel  himself  a  man  of  destiny  because  he  is  bound  up  with 
it  to  the  point  of  identification,  so  that  its  well-  or  ill-being  is  his  own. 
This  gives  enlargement  of  view,  purity  of  purpose,  a  sense  of  responsi- 
bility that  may  become  oppressive,  perhaps  temptations  at  times 
either  to  use  it  for  self-aggrandizement  or  on  the  other  hand  to  re- 
nounce it  all  and  fall  back  to  the  easier,  simpler  life,  and  live  for  individ- 
ual ends,  perhaps  according  to  Nietzsche's  ideal  of  the  superman, 
who  is  a  powerful  and  relentless  monster  of  selfishness,  incapable  of 
pity  or  regret.  The  altruistic  struggle  for  the  survival  of  others  in 
the  supremely  great  is  the  diametrical  opposite  of  this.  It  is  born  of 
a  spirit  of  sympathy,  benevolence,  cooperation,  and  love  of  mankind. 
It  is  phylogeny  exceptionally  dominant  over  ontogeny,  the  race  con- 
trolling the  individual.  It  is  rooted  in  man's  highly  gregarious  instinct, 
and  thus  makes  for  social  solidarity  and  against  disruption. 

Now,  whoever  illustrated  all  this  as  Jesus  did?  He  did  it  by 
drawing  on  the  unconscious  reserv^e  energies  as  described  above  (in  4), 
because  men  differ  most  in  their  most  conscious  activities  and  are  most 
alike  in  the  nine  tenths  of  their  nature  which  is  usually  submerged,  so 
that  in  calling  it  up  man  appeals  to  the  common  element  in  which  all, 
even  the  most  diverse,  are,  at  bottom,  one.  Here  we  reach  nearest  of  all 
to  the  secret  springs  of  Jesus'  character  and  the  simple  motivation  of  his 
life  and  works;  from  this  point  of  view  we  can  best  understand  the 
mystery  of  his  Kingdom  and  the  "  way  "  into  it.  It  is  das  ewige  MenscJi- 
liche  das  zieht  uns  hinan,  an  ideal  yet  far  from  attainment  but  that 
lures,  charms,  and  inspires  perennial  visions  of  its  ultimate  fulfilment, 
gives  us  the  norms  of  all  social  ethics,  a  standard  by  which  to  measure 
all  real  progress,  which  at  bottom  and  at  its  best  is  always  and  only 
moral,  and  that  would  minimize  hate  and  all  its  dreadful  progeny,  and 
establish  harmony  and  confraternity  over  the  world.  It  is  still  largely 
a  sentiment;  but  sentiment  dominates  the  human  heart,  and  has  already 
given  the  Christian  world  most  of  the  best  things  in  it  and  promises 
far  more  in  the  future.  No  message  to  man  is  so  authentic  as  that 
which  comes  from  his  own  phylum,  and  the  only  validification  of  its 


JESUS'  ESCHATOLOGY  427 

authority  is  that  it  rings  true  in  each  individual  soul  it  reaches.  This 
is  the  supreme  criterion  of  every  truth  and  value  in  the  humanistic 
realm  as  distinct  from  that  of  physical  science.  To  incarnate  the  best 
that  is  in  the  race  is  to  incarnate  God,  for  he  only  is  its  highest  anthro- 
pomorph. 

(F)  Other  attributes  of  greatness,  less  often  specified,  are  combi- 
nations of  pairs  of  opposites  that  are  rarely  found  in  the  same  person, 
such  as  analytic  and  synthetic,  or  critical  and  creative  powers;  traits 
which  lie  chiefly  in  the  sphere  of  intellect  or  balance  between  the  con- 
servative and  progressive  temper ;  the  union  of  Olympian  calmness  and 
enthusiasm;  of  quick  and  slow  temperaments;  vivid  imagination  along 
with  practical  common  sense;  open-mindedness  and  absence  of  preju- 
dice; readiness,  if  need  be,  to  subordinate  personal  friendship  and  all 
social,  even  family,  ties  to  a  cause  greater  than  they;  indifference  to 
fame  or  all  personal  ends;  keen  aesthetic  sense;  an  alert  and  inerrant 
conscience;  power  of  concentration;  great  strength  of  affection;  the 
group  of  qualities  we  call  personal  magnetism;  a  disposition  to  be 
always  working  over  and  improving  oneself;  ability  to  systematize 
and  make  or  apply  efficient  methods;  a  gift  for  keeping  always  in  the 
top  of  one's  condition,  physically,  mentally,  morally;  the  instinct  to 
strive  and  exert  oneself  to  the  utmost  of  his  powers  rather  than  to 
live  in  the  realm  of  inertia  and  half  efforts — these  and  other  qualities 
are  designated  in  this  literature  on  great  men  and  have  great  though 
perhaps  not  prime  significance.  In  Jesus  the  strength  of  his  affections 
was  certainly  unbounded,  although  they  were  less  concentrated  upon 
individuals  than  diffused  over  the  race,  or  at  least  those  fit  for  the  King- 
dom. He  was  well  anchored  in  Jewish  conservatism,  and  yet  ultra- 
progressive.  He  did  not  seek  fame,  and  must  have  had  rare  magne- 
tism and  charm  (see  Chapter  i).  He  gave  himself  to  his  task  with  an 
energy  that  was  unreserved  and  unflagging.  On  the  other  hand,  he 
was  probably  not  emancipated  from  racial  prejudice  and  was  inefficient 
in  methods  of  social  and  political  improvement  as  measured  by  the 
modern  standard.  He  cared  Httle  or  nothing  for  system,  either  in 
his  thinking  or  in  the  conduct  of  his  life,  and  knew  no  science  of  any 
kind.  The  rest  of  these  standards  either  test  quaHties  not  known  in 
his  day,  and  so  are  more  specific  and  less  generically  human,  or  else 
we  are  too  uninformed  concerning  Jesus'  Hfe  and  character  to  apply 
them  to  him. 


428  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

To  the  present  writer  it  seems  hardly  less  than  axiomatic  that  if 
Jesus'  personality  is  to  continue  to  have  worth  and  reality  in  the  world 
and  not  fade  into  myth,  symbol,  or  a  projection  of  the  community 
consciousness  in  the  sense  of  Kalthoff,  or  if  his  character  is  not  to  be- 
come as  formless  and  unknown  as  his  physical  traits  are  to  art,  he 
must  be  definitized  and  we  must  have  at  least  certain  fundamental 
ideas  of  what  psychological  components  entered  into  the  ensemble  of 
qualities  which  we  call  character  and  personality.  We  need  to  escape 
from  the  mystic  nebulosity  that  now  surrounds  it.  A  union  of  all  the 
superlative  traits  ascribed  to  him,  a  harmonious  synthesis  of  the  par- 
tial components  that  appear  from  different  aspects  of  his  life,  work, 
and  words,  which  shall  combine  all  the  different  views  of  him,  is  im- 
possible, for  they  could  not  be  synthetized  in  any  individual,  normal, 
abnormal,  or  supernormal.  In  place  of  a  living  person  we  should  have 
in  him  rather  a  table  of  ethological  categories  theoretically  and  log- 
ically unhomogeneous  and  the  correlation  of  which  into  a  single  human 
being  is  a  psychological  impossibility.  This  would  give  us  at  best 
only  a  classified  Hst  of  traits  with  certain  tentative  groupings  but  lack- 
ing dynamic  force  because  without  any  real  organic  unity.  If  we  cull 
these  traits  from  the  scores  of  lives  of  Jesus  during  the  last  few  score 
years,  every  possible  synthesis  of  them  thus  far  suggested  gives  at 
best  only  the  conception  of  a  personality  unprecedentedly  multiple 
or  schizophrenic,  as  if  tenanted  by  a  congeries  of  souls  of  which  now  one, 
now  another,  comes  to  the  fore.  Now  he  seems  divine,  now  very  human. 
In  the  wilderness  he  struggles  with  temptation,  yet  is  impeccable. 
Here  he  is  above  earthly  joy  and  sorrow,  yet  in  the  transfiguration 
he  seems  to  be  in  a  transport  of  euphoria,  while  in  Gethsemane 
he  is  in  agony.  Now  his  belief  is  ineluctable,  and  he  is  autodi- 
dactic,  and  again  he  feels  forsaken,  if  not  accursed,  of  God.  He  is 
called  infallible  and  inerrant,  and  yet  repeatedly  changes  his  purpose 
upon  intercession;  endowed  with  prescient  prophetic  insight  into  the 
future,  yet  dies  in  anguish  and  despair  because  his  hopes  aborted  and 
his  plans  miscarried.  From  this  vieu-point  one  could  almost  fancy 
that  we  have  before  us  a  product  of  a  series  of  efforts  to  synthetize 
into  one  the  typical  traits  and  experiences  of  many  different  real  or 
mythic  personages  of  which  primitive  culture  gives  us  many  examples, 
and  that  here  the  hazy  name,  "Jesus,"  is  simply  their  point  de  rcpere. 
He  needs  to  be  made  a  more  natural,  real,  and  dynamic  personaHty. 


JESUS'  ESCHATOLOGY  429 

Can  this  be  done?  Is  there  a  type  of  personality  that  is  more  com- 
posite and  yet  more  unified  than  those  we  know,  in  which  all  the 
essential  attributes  that  history  assigns  and  religious  psychology  needs 
can  be  combined?  Is  there  any  one  such  ensemble  of  qualities  more 
probable  than  any  other,  and  which,  in  the  light  of  the  New  Testa- 
ment data  and  also  of  the  preceding  principles,  we  can  best  conceive 
Jesus  to  have  been?  To  this  our  answer  must  be  affirmative  and  is  as 
follows : 

(i)  Jesus  had  an  invincible  sense  of  his  own  vast  superiority  over 
other  men,  and  felt  that  he  stood  closer  to  the  source  of  all  wisdom 
and  power  than  any  other  man  had  ever  stood.  He  interpreted  this 
sense  according  to  the  highest  and  fittest  thought-forms  of  his  day  and 
race,  as  the  Church  has  since  done,  as  Divine  Sonship  or  Messianity. 
He  came  to  do  this  gradually,  but  as  an  inevitable  result  of  many 
experiences  with  many  men,  which  showed  him,  as  they  must,  that  his 
insights  were  deeper,  his  personal  influence  over  those  about  him  greater, 
his  therapeutic  efl&ciency  which  he  thought  showed  unique  control  of 
demons,  was  equal  to  or  superior  to  that  of  the  greatest  of  prophets 
of  old.  The  complicated  sophistries  of  the  subtlest  of  the  Pharisees 
were  no  match  for  him,  and  although,  unlike  the  rabbis,  self-taught,  he 
found  he  could  easily  confute  them.  Those  who  crowded  about  him 
and  followed  him  to  be  healed  and  taught  regarded  him  as  a  man  of  a 
higher  order.  In  rapt  states  to  which  great  souls,  especially  among 
Orientals,  are  sometimes  subject,  his  visions,  as  in  the  baptism  and 
the  temptation,  favoured  those  fond  ideas  of  greatness  which  are 
secretly  cherished  by  every  ardent  aspiring  young  genius.  Thus  it  was 
as  inevitable  as  that  Socrates  should  find  from  converse  with  many 
men  who  thought  themselves  wise  that  he  was  wiser  than  they  all  in 
that  he  knew  that  he  knew  nothing,  that  Jesus  should,  with  his  unusual 
gifts  of  body  and  psychic  powers,  become  convinced  that  he  was  the 
Messiah.  Since  the  expectations  of  such  a  being  and  to  some  extent 
his  role  had  various  types  of  preformation,  nothing  was  more  natural 
than  that  such  a  person  in  such  a  culture  milieu  and  with  such  experi- 
ences should  come  to  feel  called  to  give  this  great  hope  a  personal  em- 
bodiment in  himself  and  an  original  interpretation  of  his  own.  Thus 
he  felt  himself  Heaven's  aristocrat,  too  exalted  to  care  for  earthly 
dignities,  and  so  he  mingled  with  the  masses,  was  friendly  to  the 
despised  publicans,  and  even  conversed  with  harlots,  as  Socrates  was 


430  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

reproached  for  doing.  In  his  assumption  of  supremacy  there  is  no 
trace  of  delusions  of  greatness.  If  he  placed  the  crown  of  sonship 
upon  his  own  head,  it  was  because  it  belonged  to  him  by  intrinsic 
merit.  Jesus'  sense  of  celestial  royalty  under  such  circumstances  and 
in  his  race  and  age  was  as  normal  as  the  behef  of  poets  that  they  were 
the  favourites  of  and  visited  by  the  muses,  or  of  potentates  that  deity 
spoke  in  their  deeds  or  of  prophets  that  he  did  so  through  their  words. 
It  may  not  be  our  interpretation  of  him  now,  but  no  other  was  within 
his  reach.  If  his  description  of  these  phenomena  in  his  own  soul  has 
become  obsolete  and  aHen,  its  strangeness  is  because  we  are  provin- 
cials of  our  own  times  and  lacT^  historic  sense,  knowledge,  or  Ein- 
fiihlung  for  human  nature  when  it  is  remote  from  us  chronologically 
and  ethnologically,  and  when  it  is  subjected  to  far  greater  strains  and 
tensions  than  are  common  in  our  civilization.  The  point  is  that  any 
other  sanest  of  men,  with  gifts,  aspirations,  and  experiences  like  his, 
would  then  and  there  have  come  to  the  same  estimation  of  himself; 
but  there  never  was  another  thus  circumstanced.  This  once  fully 
realized,  much  else  follows  naturally  enough.  Of  course,  with  such 
conceptions  of  himself,  he  would  speak  with  authority  and  autodictic 
certainty,  for  Yahveh  spoke  through  him  more  directly  than  he  had 
ever  done  through  the  prophets.  Those  who  did  not  understand  felt 
his  power,  and  no  one  ever  disobeyed  his  command.  The  sick,  told  to 
arise,  take  up  their  beds  and  walk;  the  fisher-folk  told  to  leave  all  and 
follow  him,  obeyed  on  the  instant,  wondering,  doubtless,  why  they  did 
so.  This  inborn  sense  of  superiority  gave  him  confidence  in  all  he  did 
and  said  because  the  spontaneous  inner  compulsion  which  he  felt  he 
deemed  infallible,  and  the  oracle  that  spoke  through  his  soul  seemed 
inerrant.  Perhaps  it  was  too  implicit  confidence  in  its  dehverances 
that  led  him  to  trouble  and  finally  to  death.  Had  he  not  been  fully 
persuaded  that  he  was  divine  he  would  never  have  died,  and  had  others 
not  at  last  come  to  think  him  so,  beUef  in  his  Resurrection  could  never 
have  been  established.  Thus  our  first  characterization  of  him  is  as 
one  who  above  all  others  thought  himself  divine  and  has  no  less 
uniquely  been  thought  to  be  so  by  innumerable  others  ever  since  his 
death.  He  believed  himself  a  type,  a  superman  or  man  as  he  was  meant 
to  be,  realizing  all  the  high  legitimate  ideals  of  old  ascribed  either  to 
great  men  or  to  Yahveh. 

(2)  The  trait  that  has  now  come  to  seem  second  only  to  this  is 


JESUS'  ESCHATOLOGY  431 

that  he  concealed  this  fondest  and  most  dominant  sense  of  inner  divin- 
ity. As  Socrates  hid  his  knowledge  by  the  mask  of  irony,  in  order  to 
draw  out  others  and  then  to  convict  them  of  ignorance,  so  Jesus  lived, 
an  incognito  deity  among  his  friends,  because  premature  avowal  of 
himself  would  spoil  all.  Keim,  far  more  than  any  other  biographer  of 
Jesus,  represents  him,  especially  during  the  second  part  of  the  Galilean 
ministry,  as  often  flying  or  retreating  in  order  to  escape  his  enemies. 
He  did  so,  we  are  told,  "in  order  to  preserve  himself  for  God  and  man," 
until  he  could  carry  his  cause  to  Jerusalem.  Eschatologists,  especially 
Schweitzer,  make  him  hardly  less  a  victim  of  fear  lest  his  Messianity 
should  be  prematurely  disclosed.  This  might  imperil  his  relations  with 
even  the  Twelve.  His  eschatological  secret  must  therefore  be  kept 
closely,  and  for  the  most  part  within  his  own  breast,  to  the  very  end. 
Thus  he  taught  with  reservations,  and  often,  especially  in  some  of  the 
parables,  with  intentional  obscurity.  His  identity  and  his  full  pro- 
gram were  thus  undiiiilged  and  unsuspected.  This  reticence,  whether 
from  instinct  or  deliberate  conviction,  was  a  natural  and  inevitable 
consequence  which  developed  concerning  his  own  nature  and  function. 
It  was  not  impossible  that  his  disciples  with  their  Hmited  intelligence 
would  deem  him  a  victim  of  insane  delusions,  and  at  least  his  enemies 
would  be  sure  to  make  the  most  of  so  commonplace  an  inference,  and 
it  would  be  very  contagious,  and  thus,  because  of  the  very  best  that  was 
in  him,  he  would  be  thought  mad.  Greater  yet  was  the  danger  that 
the  Jews  would  regard  a  pretender  to  the  sacred  office  of  Messiah  as 
guilty  of  sacrilege,  while  the  Roman  rulers  would  be  only  too  prone  to 
see  in  his  claims  a  perpetual  menace  to  their  supremacy  because  they 
would  think  them  prelusive  of  revolt.  These  several  motivations  for 
repression  were  together  very  strong,  and  could  not  fail  to  induce  a 
state  of  psychic  tension  unprecedentedly  great  as  well  as  constant. 
The  result  would  be  more  or  less  vacillation,  and  that  this  is  repre- 
sented as  great  is  very  true  to  human  nature.  Feeling  himself  the  re- 
pository of  such  a  treasure,  so  fraught  with  ultimate  good  to  others 
and  so  precious  to  himself,  yet  so  beset  by  dangers  that  all  might  be 
easily  lost  before  the  day  of  fruition  came,  it  would  be  strange  indeed 
if  he  should  not  be  anxious,  tense,  and  ready  at  least  to  be  a  fugitive 
for  his  treasure's  sake  when  he  thought  perils  threatened,  and  at  other 
securer  moments  should  seem  almost  at  the  point  of  giving  away  his 
secret,  as  a  kind  of  sacred  trust  committed  to  his  favourites  among 


432  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

his  esoteric  circle,  with  whom  he  must  have  longed  to  share  it.  With- 
out doing  so  he  doubtless  felt  that  their  mutual  confidence  would  be 
impaired  should  they  ever  know  his  secret.  In  this  struggle,  however, 
caution  prevailed,  and  he  went  to  death  alone,  without  revealing  the 
secret  that  lay  closest  and  warmest  about  his  heart.  This  itself  was  a 
unique  and  pathetic  struggle  with  a  heroic  denouement.  It  was  not 
egoism  or  the  lust  of  receiving  homage  that  pleaded  for  avowal,  or 
cowardice  that  made  him  flee.  On  the  one  hand,  he  may  have  felt  it 
disloyal  to  Yahveh  to  hide  it,  and  on  the  other  he  may  have  been  ready 
to  seem  a  skulking  fugitive  for  its  greater  security.  How  frequent 
these  alternations  were,  or  how  far  they  went  each  way,  we  do  not  know; 
nor  is  this  so  very  essential.  The  point  is  that  we  have  here  a  situation 
of  tragic  intensity  with  an  attendant  strain  sustained  we  know  not  how 
long,  but  with  no  pathological  traces  either  concomitant  or  in  the 
sequel,  and  carried  to  the  final  issue  in  a  way  that  has  made  it  all  the 
most  psychodynamogenic  in  history.  It  is  a  story  of  supreme  great- 
ness surrendering  self,  disguised,  humiliated,  and  yet  in  the  end  coming 
to  its  own.  This  is  the  truth  that  underlies  and  informs  every  romance 
and  drama,  and  is  the  epitome  of  every  great  life  that  struggles,  suf- 
fers, and  achieves.  It  gives  an  ethical  which  is  even  greater  than  the 
hedonic  narcosis,  because  it  makes  us  feel  that  the  world,  whether 
beautiful  or  not,  is  morally  good  to  its  very  core.  Jesus  was  thus  like 
a  prince  of  royal  blood  who  found  himself  alone  in  a  hostile  land  with- 
out means  or  credentials  which  any  one  could  be  trusted  to  accept, 
and  so  thrown  upon  his  own  personal  resources,  but  charged  with  the 
commission  of  organizing  a  counter-kingdom  at  short  notice  that  would 
last  until  the  invincible  forces  of  his  Father  should  arrive  and  sweep 
away  all  but  the  remnant  that  rallied  about  his  Son,  and  estabhsh 
them  in  the  seats  of  power  and  honour  forever.  Everything  thus 
depended  upon  his  own  initiative,  sagacity,  caution,  and  fidelity  to 
his  trust.  This  and  the  old  and  strong,  though  vague  and  polymorphic, 
hope-dream  of  a  deliverer  from  within  and  of  intervention  from  above — 
these  two  were  his  only  resources. 

(3)  Under  such  strain  and  with  such  a  high  tension  of  opposite 
impulsions  we  have  to  think  of  the  diagnosis  of  anxiety,  the  mother  of 
all  fears,  and  realize  how  many  morbid  psychoses  might  have  arisen. 
He  might  have  fled  from  such  a  reahty  and  taken  refuge  in  the  old 
dreameries  and  vaticinations  of  the  new  Kingdom  and  its  Lord,  or 


JESUS'  ESCHATOLOGY  433 

fallen  into  the  old  habit  of  watchful  waiting.  Instead  of  presentifying 
all  the  past  and  future  in  the  here  and  now,  one  of  the  most  all- 
comprehending  traits  of  greatness,  he  might  have  evacuated  them  and 
lapsed  to  mere  memories  and  hopes;  or  conversely  he  might  have  pre- 
cipitated the  issue  by  rushing  prematurely  toward  his  goal  with  the 
bhnd  frantic  zeal  of  a  reformer  whose  motto  is,  "All  or  nothing  and 
that  now."  Jesus  did  neither,  but  chose  the  hardest  middle  course. 
Now,  what  was  the  inevitable  psychological  effect  of  this  strain?  It 
was  to  keep  him  unusually  alert,  keen,  augmenting  to  the  utmost,  and 
instead  of  paralyzing  all  his  powers,  to  raise  and  keep  them  at  their 
highest  potential.  Reserve  energies  would  be  mobilized,  deeper  un- 
conscious strata  would  be  tapped  and  drawn  on,  a  higher  efficiency 
equihbrium  would  be  established,  a  state  of  psychic  erethism  would 
tend  to  become  habitual,  while  the  usual  barriers  of  fatigue  and  all 
personal  and  social  inhibitions  would  be  transcended  and  new  ranges  of 
power  attained.  Mentation  would  be  accelerated,  will-power  aug- 
mented, feelings  intensified.  The  entire  personality  would  be  charged 
to  its  saturation  point  with  available  but  latent  energy,  provided  only 
that  the  incitement  was  in  the  direction  of  the  all-dominant  protension. 
What  was  this,  and  what  did  Jesus  supremely  want? 

It  was  to  prepare  for  the  Kingdom  which  was  just  at  hand,  and 
the  only  means  to  this  end  was  to  make  people  believe  in  it  and  in  him 
as  its  promised  head;  but  instead  of  open  avowal,  he  had  to  lay  the 
foundations  on  which  it  could  and  would  be  surely  built  when  all 
preparations  were  complete.  The  only  possible  course  thus  open  to 
him  was  to  impress  himself,  that  is,  his  own  personality,  so  intensely 
and  favourably  upon  all  with  whom  he  came  in  contact,  that  they 
would  sooner  or  later  inevitably  come  to  feel  that  he  was  himself  no 
other  than  the  true  Messiah.  This,  then,  was  his  task.  Those  he 
met,  healed,  taught,  counselled,  reproved  or  lived  with,  must  be  made 
to  so  love,  admire,  obey,  depend  on,  feel  in  awe  of  him,  that  they 
would  sometime  inevitably  come  to  realize  that  their  feelings  of  affec- 
tion, reverence,  gratitude,  dependence,  and  so  forth,  were  the  selfsame 
that  were  due  to  the  Messiah,  and  that  therefore  he  must  himself  be 
indeed  nothing  less  or  other  than  the  Promised  One.  It  was  indeed  a 
stupendous  task  with  people  so  sluggish  of  soul.  It  must  mean  a  re- 
education of  so  radical  a  sort  that  it  might  in  some  cases  be  well  com- 
pared to  arousal  from  the  dead.    But  upon  just  this  task  all  Jesus' 


434  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

superior  and  very  highly  wrought  powers  were  bent.  In  everything 
he  did  and  said,  from  the  choice  of  disciples  to  the  final  visit  to  Jerusa- 
lem, he  was  striving  simply  and  solely  to  win  full  and  spontaneous 
recognition  for  what  he  was.  He  put  himself  in  the  place  of  him 
whom  the  Baptist  had  announced  as  a  successor  greater  than  he;  he 
healed,  cast  out  demons,  explained  and  fulfilled  Scripture  by  turning 
the  prophecies  upon  himself.  He  spoke  •with  superhuman  authority 
as  Yahveh  gave  the  law  at  Sinai,  but  was  greater  than  Moses  or  the 
prophets;  and  he  must,  by  his  frequent  withdrawals  and  prayer,  have 
seemed  to  all  about  him  in  the  closest  rapport  with  Yahveh.  All 
this,  however,  gradually  seemed  to  him  in  vain  so  far  as  this  supreme 
end  of  securing  the  unforced  acclimation  of  himself  as  the  one  who  was 
to  come  was  concerned.  When  he  thought  he  saw  signs  of  this  recog- 
nition in  the  converse  or  conduct  of  his  disciples  or  followers  or  in  the 
multitude,  he  was  elated  with  hope,  for  the  good  seed  seemed  to  have 
struck  root  and  sprouted.  But  when  they  seemed  cold  or  dense,  his 
spirits  sank.  It  sometimes  seemed  as  if  the  very  stones  would  shout 
his  true  function.  But  all  the  people  who  knew  him  remained  dumb, 
blind,  spiritually  unilluminated.  He  had  cast  his  pearls  before  swine, 
and  so  as  a  last  resort  he  turned  to  the  program  of  the  pagan  gods  who 
had  to  be  immolated  before  they  were  recognized  and  worshipped. 

During  all  this  period  he  was  most  assiduously  at  work  in  the 
only  ways  open  to  him  in  his  desperate  quest  for  identification,  throw- 
ing himself  with  abandon  into  every  opportunity,  in  convers- 
ing mth  individuals,  flashing  all  the  light  that  was  in  him  into  the 
dark  recesses  of  the  souls  of  either  inquirers  or  critics,  in  such  a  way 
that  each  of  these  encounters  must  have  seemed  memorable  to  each 
of  his  interlocutors,  inventing  that  most  luminous  and  portative 
pedagogic  instrument  known  as  the  parable,  teaching  his  Uttle  school 
or  circle,  while  wandering  about,  always  ready  to  confer  with  individ- 
uals or  talk  to  larger  groups,  healing  all  he  could  among  those  he  met, 
organizing  and  launching  his  propaganda  by  proxies,  helping  the  needy, 
defining  his  relations  to  the  State,  and,  what  was  still  more  difficult,  to 
the  hierarchy  and  its  hopes,  altogether  involving  prodigious  activity, 
while  in  it  all  he  remained  true  to  the  functions  of  Messianity  as  he 
had  come  to  conceive  it.  He  was  always  eager  and  responsive  toward 
every  indication  of  any  attitude  by  any  one  toward  himself  and  his 
Kingdom,  but  all  the  while  never  quite  came  to  the  point  of  trusting 


JESUS'  ESCHATOLOGY  435 

open  avowal,  though  never  ceasing  to  trust  himself.  It  was  an  educa- 
tional campaign  unprecedented  in  the  momentous  issues  at  stake,  in 
the  brevity  of  time  during  which  it  must  all  be  accomplished,  and  in 
the  array  of  supernatural  powers  appealing  to  both  hope  and  fear. 
The  more  we  understand  it,  the  more  we  marvel  at  the  amount  of 
inner  and  outer  work  Jesus  put  into  it,  the  variety  of  resources  devised 
and  employed,  the  boldness  and  originality  of  it  all,  and  the  invincible 
pertinacity  with  which  the  supreme  end  was  clung  to  and  pursued 
through  all  the  many  and  devious  ways  that  were  brought  to  converge 
upon  it.  The  whole  of  Hfe  had  to  be  reconstructed  and  brought  under 
the  Ught  of  new  apperceptive  centres  in  order  to  bring  fitness  to  enter 
his  Kingdom. 

Then,  when  all  seemed  doomed  to  failure,  Jesus'  unconquerable 
soul  refused  to  yield  to  despair  but  accepted  his  own  death  as  the  only 
means  to  the  end  of  establishing  the  Kingdom,  and  this  inevitably 
enhanced  still  more  his  psychic  tension.  His  life  must  be  offered  up  as 
a  last  resource,  not  only  in  order  to  make  a  still  stronger  appeal  to  the 
Father  to  intervene  and  bring  the  consummation,  but  as  a  final  appeal 
for  recognition.  Death,  especially  in  its  most  cruel  and  degrading  form, 
if  voluntary  and  as  an  act  of  devotion,  beatifies  the  memory  of  the 
victim,  and  in  the  new  light  and  warmth  thus  generated  he  hoped  to  be 
seen  as  what  he  was,  for  such  a  death  would  surely  reveal  him.  But  he 
must  die  aright  with  the  issues  clearly  drawn  and  manifest  to  all.  It 
must  come  in  no  obscure  way,  but  openly,  facing  all  the  hierarchical 
and  political  powers  that  opposed  the  Kingdom.  Thus,  when  the 
will  to  live  ebbed  over  into  the  counter-will  to  die,  the  latter  came  not 
as  outer  fate,  to  be  stoically  resigned  to,  but  as  a  freely  accepted  inner 
destiny.  Moreover,  every  step  downward  to  the  tomb  must  be  fully 
explored.  Every  counter-trend  of  the  affirmation  of  life  must  be  felt 
for  all  it  could  mean,  for  only  thus  could  death  be  complete.  This 
involved  the  still  higher  potentialization  and  the  arousal  of  still  deeper 
strata  of  latent  energy.  Because  he  was  type-,  race-,  and  also  super- 
man he  had  vastly  more  to  sacrifice;  death  would  mean  more  to  him, 
and  in  a  sense  it  would  take  more  lethal  energies  to  quell  such  a  being. 
Even  his  soul  had  to  die  in  despair.  Hence,  the  tension  always  caused 
by  impending  death  was  not  merely  that  caused  in  the  soul  of  other 
heroes  condemned  and  approaching  the  great  shadow,  but  his  soul  must 
have  experienced  the  greatest  tension  of  any  the  world  has  seen.    In  his 


436  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

public  life,  and  especially  in  his  closing  scenes,  more  human  trends  were 
focussed  into  and  thence  irradiated  from  his  own  psychophysical  system 
than  any  one  else  has  yet  attained  before  or  since,  and  this  makes 
him  so  dynamogenic.  In  his  conscious  and  unconscious  nature  the 
best  and  highest  moral  forces  before  him  converged,  and  from  him  they 
have  since  diverged.  We  have  lately  said  and  heard  much  of  the 
higher  powers  of  man,  but  here  we  have  phenomena  of  an  altitude 
which,  though  many  have  approached,  none  has  ever  yet  attained,  so 
that  the  psychology  of  Jesus  remains  the  unique  psychology  of  human- 
ity at  the  acme  of  its  insights  and  in  the  supreme  actus  purus  of  moral 
efficiency.^ 

Given  such  a  being,  charged  with  such  functions  and  thus  circum- 
stanced, it  follows  necessarily  that  he  would  possess  certain  traits. 

(a)  The  algedonic  scale  in  which  his  life  was  lived  out  would  be 
a  very  long  one,  running  between  the  maximal  degrees  of  pleasure  and 
pain,  or  from  the  dignity  of  a  God  coming  in  all  the  Father's  power 
and  glory,  to  cruel  and  shameful  death  on  the  cross,  abandoned  by 
both  God  and  men.  This  would  involve  a  wide  gamut  of  moods  with- 
out implying  any  duality  of  nature  in  the  sense  represented  above  by 
Wiinsche,  and  it  would  develop  unusual  capacity  to  both  suffer  and 
enjoy,  as  the  iiisus  that  impelled  him  was  now  blocked  and  now  facili- 
tated. Thus  Jesus  could  pass  all  the  way  from  the  transfiguration 
to  the  garden  without  scathe  or  loss  of  psychic  unity  for  he  could 
endure,  with  no  peril  to  complete  normahty  and  sanity,  both  the 
heights  and  depths  of  human  experience.  Extreme  vicissitudes  of 
fortune  thus  brought  no  dissociations,  for  keenly  as  he  felt  them  he 
surrendered  to  neither  fate,  both  Hving  by  and  concealing  his  secret 
with  perfect  integrity  of  soul.  He  was  inebriated  by  neither  the  cup 
of  joy  nor  that  of  sorrow,  deeply  as  he  drank  of  both.  Neither  the 
exhilaration  of  hope  nor,  save  at  the  last  moments,  the  flaccidity  of 
despair,  could  possess  or  sweep  his  soul  from  its  moorings.  Thus  he 
could  enter  into  the  joy  and  sorrow  of  others,  enjoy  the  good  things  of 
life,  and  not  be  enervated  or  lose  the  power  to  face  any  difficulty  or 
endure  any  hardship.  This  temper  and  environment  inclined  him  to 
gravitate  not  toward  the  indifference  point,  midway  between  pleasure 

IK.  Weifkl-  "Jesu  Personlichkeit;  eine  psychologische  Studie."  Halle,  igo8,  47  p.  Erich  Haupt:  "Die  eschalo- 
logischen  Aussapen  Jcsu  in  den  synoptischen  Evangelicn."  Berlin,  1895,  167  p.  August  Pott:  "Das  Hoffen  im  neuen 
lestament  in  seiner  HeziehungzumGlauben."  Leipzig,  1015,  203  p.  O.  Holtzmann:^'Christus."  Leipzig,  1907,  148  p. 
Johannes  Weiss:    Jesus  von  Nazareth,  Mylhus  oder  Geschichte?"    Tubingen,  1910   171  p 


JESUS'  ESCHATOLOGY  437 

and  pain,  like  a  Buddhist  saint  approaching  Nirvana,  or  the  Stoic 
sage  who  strives  to  be  above  emotion,  nor  was  he  in  danger  of  being 
caught  at  either  extreme.  Rather,  he  oscillated  between  both,  so  that 
now  hope  and  now  fear  absorbed  him.  This  both  gave  and  presup- 
posed that  rare  temper  of  spirit  that  could  bend  very  far  either  way 
without  either  breaking  or  losing  any  of  the  elasticity  of  rebound.  He 
also  took  both  his  pleasure  and  his  pain  in  the  things  that  he  and  man 
ought,  because  his  primary  orientation  was  moral.  Hence  the  heaven 
and  hell  between  which  his  life  really  moved  were  both  in  all  their 
substance  and  reality  within  his  own  breast,  so  that  both  are  eternal 
because  in  some  sense  they  are  essential  to  every  moral  consciousness 
that  is  complete.  In  the  story  of  Jesus'  preexistence  with  God  in 
heaven  and  of  his  descent  into  Sheol,  we  have  only  the  crude  patent 
imagery  which  strove  to  express  this  latent  sense  of  the  free  ranging 
of  his  soul  between  the  ultimate  terms  of  euphoria  and  disphoria  to 
which  the  sublime  Semitic  genius  gave  a  moral  interpretation,  con- 
ceiving the  longest  dimension  of  man's  universe  as  that  which  stretches 
between  the  two  poles  of  good  and  evil.  Thus  Jesus  did  not  live  on  a 
plain  interspersed  with  hills  or  dark  valleys,  like  most  of  us,  but  on  a 
ladder  the  top  of  which  was  at  the  summit  of  hedonic  goodness  while 
the  bottom  went  to  the  depths  of  sin  and  torture.  Thus  happiness  and 
goodness  on  the  one  hand,  and  pain  and  sin  on  the  other,  are  to  such  a 
consciousness  one  and  inseparable. 

(b)  All  men  love  and  hate,  but  none  as  he  did.  Some  follow  the 
craven  maxim,  "Make  no  enemies,"  a  coward  adage  of  small  shop- 
keepers or  selfish  politics,  instead  of  choosing  carefully  some  evil,  in  a 
world  so  abounding  in  it,  and  fighting  it  with  might  and  main.  No 
invectives  were  ever  so  charged  with  scorn,  hate,  and  loathing  as  those 
he  hurled  against  men  who  obstructed  the  way  of  the  kingdom  of 
righteousness.  He  pictured  an  assize  of  all  the  world,  pronounced  the 
sentence  of  doom  upon  the  damned,  saw  God's  wrath  sweep  away  most 
of  the  inhabitants  of  the  earth  into  the  fiery  realm  of  Satan,  and  our 
earth  melting  with  fervent  heat.  Jesus'  rage  against  iniquity  and 
religious  stupidity  knew  no  bounds.  Nor  was  there  any  reason  why  he 
should  set  bounds  to  it,  for  no  anger  can  be  too  great  against  it.  On 
the  other  hand,  he  was  the  world's  greatest  lover,  for  to  love  and  serve 
God  and  man  epitomized  all  his  teaching,  whether  by  precept  or  ex- 
ample.   Love  that  is  usually  directed  to  parents,  wife,  or  children,  in 


438  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

him  was  sublimated  to  the  heavenly  Father  and  to  mankind.  He 
longed  to  love  his  enemies,  sinners,  the  outcasts,  if  they  would  only 
accept  his  love.  All  this  the  world  knows  by  heart,  but  it  does  not 
realize  how  far  any  high  degree  of  love  or  hate  involves  its  opposite. 
We  say  he  died  as  a  love-sacrifice,  but  it  is  equally  true  that  he  died 
because  of  his  irrepressible  hate  of  the  enemies  of  the  Kingdom.  Be- 
cause of  his  stern  suppression  of  his  great  secret  as  to  who  he  was,  the 
tension  broke  through  in  other  directions  where  there  was  no  such 
censorship,  and  here  the  vents  were  ecstasies  of  love  and  transports  of 
hate  to  a  degree  that  would  not  have  occurred  had  there  been  no  inner 
or  outer  check  upon  the  open  avowal  of  his  Messianity,  just  as  the  same 
inhibition  increased  the  ranges  of  his  experience  with  pleasure  and  pain 
as  we  saw  above.  His  love  and  hate  were  over-determined  and  hyper- 
accentuated  by  this  hidden  cause.  The  point  is  that  his  great  repres- 
sion must  find  vicarious  or  surrogate  expression  to  relieve  the  inner 
conflict.  We  are  but  just  learning  the  power  of  a  suppressed  wish  and 
how  it  may  dominate  life,  normal  and  abnormal,  and  also  something 
of  the  mechanisms  by  which  the  energy  generated  by  one  group  of 
either  impulses  or  ideas  may  be  transferred  to  others  that  seem  remote 
from  them.  Hegel  taught  us  that  ideas,  and  psychoanalysis  has 
shown  that  both  feelings  and  impulses  to  action,  go  in  pairs  of  polar 
opposites.  This  shows  us  that  the  ego  or  self  is  not  the  simple  unitary 
thing  it  was  thought  but  a  group  composed  of  the  most  varied  elements, 
both  conscious  and  unconscious,  and  very  hable  under  strain  to  be 
broken  up  into  its  simpler  components.  Thus  some  rupture  of  con- 
tinuity at  whatever  be  the  weakest  point  is  especially  liable  to  occur 
under  great  and  prolonged  stress  and  strain.  Where  this  danger  im- 
pels, the  instinctive  autotherapy  is  an  intensified  and  especially  varied 
play  over  all  the  gamut  of  affectivity,  as  we  see  in  its  pathological 
manifestations  in  the  hypermotivity  of  hysteria.  Manifest  as  these 
tendencies  are  in  what  we  know  of  Jesus,  they  are,  nevertheless,  even 
when  he  seems  to  let  himself  go  with  abandon,  always  under  the  strong 
control  of  the  higher  moral  purpose.  Whatever  his  temperament, 
which  may  very  likely  have  been  that  of  a  man  liable  to  very  strong 
passion,  his  cause  was  always  supreme,  so  that  to  the  most  violent 
tempests  that  raged  within  he  could  always  say,  "Peace,  be  still"  and 
be  obeyed.  We  still  need  larger  conceptions  of  his  full  humanity. 
We  must  insist  upon  putting  posse  non  peccare  in  the  place  of  non  posse 


JESUS'  ESCHATOLOGY  439 

peccare  in  conceiving  him,  and  realize  that  to  be  tempted  yet  without 
sin  is  a  harmatological  as  well  as  a  psychological  impossibihty,  and  that 
to  know  sin  is  to  feel  it  from  within  though  not  necessarily  to  have  such 
acquaintance  with  it  as  Paul,  Augustine,  and  others  illustrate.  To  Hve 
under  the  power  of  a  supreme  wish  supremely  repressed  would  itself 
give  a  unique  moral  strength  and  also  a  sense  of  immunity,  while  it 
would  at  the  same  time  impel  one  to  explore  all  the  possibihties  of  the 
tragicomedy  of  Hfe.  It  would  tend  to  maximize  every  response  to 
every  experience  because  of  the  principle,  as  true  in  psychology  as  in 
physics,  that  repression  generates  tension,  and  tension  must  seek  every 
vent. 

(c)  The  chief  content  of  Jesus'  consciousness  was  the  Kingdom, 
and  his  chief  purpose  was  to  bring  it  in.  His  will,  that  impelled  him  to 
do  any  deeds  that  would  advance  it  and  resist  any  obstacles  it  encoun- 
tered, was  the  entelechy  of  his  Hfe.  To  this  not  only  feehng  but  in- 
tellect was  subordinated.  The  latter  was  of  a  type  hard  for  us  to 
understand,  not  only  because  it  was  so  Oriental  in  its  florid  pictographic 
imagery,  but  because  it  was  of  a  type  of  mentation  that  has  been  more 
or  less  transcended.  His  was  not  only  a  prescientific  but  largely  a 
prelogical  age.  Poetry  was  in  the  place  now  occupied  by  philosophy, 
and  the  day  of  systems  of  ordered  thought  had  not  dawned  in  his 
environment,  so  that  the  repressive  influences  of  consistency  were 
relatively  unknown.  Men  thought  by  flashes,  as  spontaneous  up- 
gushes  of  impulsion  dictated,  and  on  the  spur  of  occasion.  Mental 
freedom  was  unharnessed  by  a  knowledge  of  the  laws  of  either  nature 
or  mind.  The  criterion  of  truth  was  the  strength  of  the  sentiment  of 
conviction  and  certainty  behind  it.  The  modern  taste  for  rationahty 
was  undeveloped.  The  eschatological  writings  and  vaticinations  of  this 
age  were  the  classic  outcrop  of  this  stage  of  mentation.  That  was  true 
that  was  supremely  willed  or  felt  under  the  present  stress.  In  a  great 
genius  under  the  pressure  of  desperate  straits,  fighting  a  hand-to- 
hand  conflict  with  despair,  we  have  the  best  paradigm  of  the  struggle  to 
survive  and  to  validate  its  great  affirmations.  Nothing  is  so  versatile, 
polymorphic,  proUfic  in  resources,  so  strenuous  in  all  its  various  striv- 
ings, seems  so  many  different  sorts  of  man  in  turn,  as  now  one,  now 
another,  side  of  his  psychic  microcosm  appears.  Under  no  other 
conditions  has  the  individual  such  power  to  call  upon  the  larger  racial 
soul  within  him  and  to  tap  its  almost  Hmitless  reserve  energies;  to 


440  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

break  through  all  the  pannicules  that  separate  men;  to  respond  to  the 
exigencies  of  a  cause  that  transcends  all  such  limitations;  to  be  con- 
servative or  radical,  old  in  wisdom  or  young  in  enthusiasm  and  vigour 
of  action;  to  love  now  peace,  now  war;  now  to  be  meek,  patient,  and  hum- 
ble, and  now  aggressive  and  proud  to  a  degree,  able  to  run  through  all 
the  diapason  of  temperament  and  even  the  greater  one  of  moods,  dis- 
playing traits  usually  conceived  as  predominant  in  the  different  races 
of  men  and  even  sects;  to  seem  now  naive,  now  sophisticated,  and  self- 
conscious;  to  show  the  burgeoning  of  the  different  psychic  diatheses 
that  when  fully  flowered  make  optimists  or  pessimists,  realists  or  ideal- 
ists, pragmatists  or  devotees  of  the  theoretical,  contemplative,  or  even 
mystic  life,  and  the  rest;  in  a  word,  to  show  forth  the  basal  humanity 
that  makes  geniuses,  as  it  were,  spectators  of  and  participants  in  all 
events.  We  may  thus  now  conceive  such  a  being  as  Jesus,  not  as  an 
unhistoric,  syncretic  artifact,  but  more,  rather  than  less,  real  than 
others,  because  better  representing  the  human  genus  and  made  natural 
by  the  fact  that  his  cause  embodied  the  supreme  interests  of  the  race. 

(d)  The  newest  psychology  enables  us  now  to  understand,  by  no 
means  fully  but  far  better  than  before,  a  large  group  of  phenomena 
most  commonly  found  in  religions,  whether  Christian,  ethnic,  or  even 
most  primitive,  always  more  or  less  mysterious  and  very  diversely 
interpreted.  Most  of  them  now  have  to  be  conceived  as  the  efforts  of 
the  individual  to  come  into  his  larger  racial  inheritance,  or  of  conscious- 
ness to  avail  itself  of  its  vaster  unconscious  resources. 

A  glance  at  the  psychology  of  inspiration  will  help  us  here.  R. 
Hennig,^  who  gives  a  bibliography  of  sixty-four  titles  on  the  subject, 
reported  the  testimony  of  some  scores  of  prominent  writers,  living  and 
dead,  as  to  how  their  best  work  was  done.  Uhland  said  his  poems 
wrote  themselves.  George  Sand  described  herself  as  another  being 
when  she  wrote.  Mrs.  Stowe  did  not  know  Uncle  Tom  was  dead  till 
she  read  it  afterward.  Hardy  was  often  almost  unconscious,  and  felt 
as  if  he  were  a  medium.  Some  write  as  if  suffering  a  seizure,  and  are 
curious  afterward  to  know  what  they  have  done.  Mozart  did  nothing, 
and  could  not  remember,  add  to,  or  subtract  from  what  was  given  him. 
Some  do  their  best  work  when  thinking  of  something  else.  Helmholtz 
wondered  where  his  best  thoughts  came  from.  Goethe  said  that  all 
the  highest  productivity  and  deepest  aperqus  are  in  no  man's  power. 

>"Das  Wcsen  der  Inspiration."    Schrijlen  d.  Cesell.f.  psychologische  Forschung,  igu.     Saramlung  IV,  Heft  17. 


JESUS'  ESCHATOLOGY  441 

Some  describe  themselves  as  above  mundane  influences,  and  others  say 
their  ideas  seem  to  be  presented  to  them.  Something  else  uses  them  as 
a  tool.  Others  describe  themselves  as  looking  on  and  having  no  part 
in  it  all.  Stevenson  described  this  as  the  work  of  the  "brownies  of  the 
brain."  Regnault  spoke  of  this  power  as  a  "benevolent  stranger" ;  and 
testimonies  of  this  sort  might  be  indefinitely  multiplied.  Once  this 
elevation  was  thought  to  be  caused  by  one  of  the  choir  of  muses,  by 
Urania  or  some  other  celestial  patroness  that  had  to  be  invoked  or 
wooed. 

Such  experiences  are  commonest  in  religion,  where  they  occur  not 
only  in  the  intellectual  but  in  all  spheres  of  life.  For  the  Buddhist 
it  was  absorption;  for  the  neo-Platonist,  ecstasy;  for  Swedenborg, 
illumination  and  revelation;  for  Mohammed,  the  angel  Gabriel;  for  the 
Shakers  and  Quakers,  "the  power";  for  Fox,  possession  by  the  Spirit; 
for  the  modern  Spiritualist,  occupation  of  the  place  of  his  own  soul  by 
that  of  some  departed  great  one  or  friend;  for  Christian  Science,  un- 
conscious mind;  for  James,  the  higher  powers  of  man;  for  Arnold,  a 
power,  not  self,  making  for  righteousness;  for  Socrates,  his  familiar 
spirit;  for  St.  Paul,  the  Holy  Ghost. 

Under  the  influence  of  transmigration  cults  and  theories,  the 
adept,  perhaps  from  some  dcja-vu  experience,  thinks  he  has  made  con- 
tact with  one  or  more  of  his  own  past  lives.  Karma  teaches  that  every 
new  birth  is  higher  or  lower  according  to  the  net  sum  of  merit  or  de- 
merit in  the  series  of  previous  existences,  as  traducianists  thought  the 
results  of  Adam's  transgressions  were  inherited.  Plato  thought  to 
illustrate  his  doctrine  of  preexistence  and  reminiscence  by  evoking  a 
demonstration  of  the  forty-seventh  proposition  of  Euclid  from  the 
mind  of  the  ignorant  slave  boy,  Meno.  The  quest  of  ideas  he  thought 
was  the  quest  for  immortality.  The  philosopher  loves  and  woos 
death  in  his  passion  to  pass  from  the  concrete  and  individual  to  the 
general  and  abstract.  He  seeks  the  transcendent,  metaphysical, 
noumenal,  and  turns  from  the  immanent  and  phenomenal;  and  once 
securely  anchored  to  these  deathless  ideas,  the  soul  shares  their  per- 
durability.  New  noetic  experiences  are  often  interpreted  as  a  kind 
of  letting  out  imprisoned  powers  into  a  larger  freedom. 

All  these  experiences  or  cults  geneticism  conceives  as  so  many  ways 
by  which  the  individual  gets  into  rapport  with  the  genus,  and  is  in- 
formed, facihtated,  reinforced,  or  checked  by  its  larger  life  and  its  all- 


442  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

dominant  interests,  and  the  species  in  us  is  largely  represented  by 
the  unconscious  as  the  individual  is  by  our  conscious  life.  In  prayer 
we  hold  converse  with  it,  either  as  Christ,  the  embodiment  of  Mansoul, 
or  the  Son  of  Man,  or  else  with  the  yet  larger  cosmic  soul  we  are  wont 
to  call  God.  The  story  of  Jesus  represents  the  typical  individual  be- 
ing subjected  to  the  soul  of  the  human  phylum,  and  all  the  above  phe- 
nomena are  phases  of  the  same  process.  An  indefinitely  long  series  of 
biographies  would  be  needed  to  record  the  complete  pedigree  of  each 
soul.  This  present  personal  life  is  only  a  day,  or  a  single  flitting  mood 
or  fancy  representing  one  aspect  of  a  larger,  truer  life  which  runs 
through  the  whole  series,  as  the  sense  of  a  discourse  pervades  each  of 
its  single  words  and  sentences,  in  which  birth  and  death  are  only  punctu- 
ation points.  The  fact  that  the  soul  has  been  immortal  through  such  a 
succession  of  lives,  is  the  best  of  all  indications  that  it  will  live  on  with 
increasing  momentum.  Thus,  in  each  individual  but  very  little  of 
the  whole  can  be  expressed;  and  the  instinct  to  attain  all-sided  utter- 
ance in  thought  and  deed,  here  and  now,  the  stronger  it  is,  is  only  a 
partial  expression  of  the  selfsame  impulse  that  constitutes  the  promise 
and  potency  that  will  go  over  to  other  lives  that  spring  from  our  own, 
till  all  the  possibilities  are  exhausted,  and  till  after  having  lived  out  all 
the  orders  of  Ufe,  and  having  ascended  through  every  stage  of  psychic 
metamorphosis,  we  rest  in  the  end  in  the  infinite  from  which  we  came 
in  the  beginning,  and  the  cycle  of  evolution  is  complete. 

The  soul  thus  in  seeking  to  expand  itself,  strives  to  draw  on  the 
larger  life  of  the  race  within  us.  If  the  individual  had  been  created 
de  novo  with  no  race  history,  with  no  psychic  or  other  vestiges  of  his 
long  pedigree,  and  no  germs  of  future  generations  in  him,  it  is  hard 
to  conceive  how  he  could  ever  have  sought  general  ideas  or  cared  for 
any  consensus  semper  uhique  et  ad  omnibus,  or  sought  for  categories 
vaHd  for  all  orders  of  existence,  or  how  such  a  being  could  have  felt 
any  form  of  afflatus.  This  and  even  the  speculative  passion  as  Aris- 
totle describes  it  in  the  contemplative  life,  charm  and  draw  us  because 
we  inherit  in  an  adumbrated  way  aU  the  experience  of  our  forbears, 
and  remember  them  across  thousands  of  birth  and  death  nodes,  and 
find  them  so  much  better,  vaster,  and  stronger  than  we  are.  To  draw 
upon  this  reservoir  is  the  purpose  of  every  ascetic  cult,  religious  exer- 
cise or  attitude,  dance,  or  even  drug.  How  to  arouse  these  human 
energies,  usually  dormant  in  the  individual,  in  a  way  to  augment  life 


JESUS'  ESCHATOLOGY  443 

here  and  hereafter,  and  how  to  apply  them  in  a  practice  of  personal  and 
social  Ufe  in  a  way  to  conserve  the  best  that  has  come  to  us  from  the 
past  and  to  ensure  perpetual  progress,  it  is  a  great  achievement  of 
Christianity  to  have  set  forth,  because  in  its  study  and  practice  we 
find  the  deeper  unconscious  racial  soul  of  man  incarnate  as  nowhere 
else.  When  tempted  to  escape  his  sentence,  Socrates  dreamed  that 
the  spirit  of  the  laws  appeared  to  him  and  reminded  him  that  it  was  the 
citizen's  duty  to  the  state  to  remain  loyal  to  it  to  the  end.  So,  too, 
the  beatitudes  and  about  all  of  the  sermon  on  the  mount  consist  of 
injunctions  to  live  for  and  in  the  community,  almost  as  much  as  the 
individual  ant  or  bee,  which  is  often  called  the  ideal  citizen  socius,  does, 
and  which  LiHenfeld  says  in  substance  lives  more  in  accordance  with 
the  precepts  of  the  Lord's  Prayer  than  do  the  members  of  any  other 
gregarious  species,  not  excepting  the  primitive  Christian  communities. 
Self  must  be  developed  to  the  uttermost  degree  that  can  make  the 
individual  a  more  efficient  instrument  of  social  service.  It  is  only 
because  and  so  far  as  self  sets  up  as  an  end  to  itself  that  it  sins  and 
needs  conversion.  Reason  must  not  obscure  the  light  within.  Wealth 
and  power  are  trusts  for  the  common  weal.  To  love  and  serve  man  is 
to  love  and  serve  God,  because  God  is  the  embodiment  of  man's  ideal 
knowledge  of  his  best  self,  personified  and  projected  into  the  celestial 
regions.  He  is  the  source  and  end,  the  alpha  and  omega  of  man,  and 
also  of  his  earthly  home.  Every  duty  to  God  is  a  duty  to  the  race  and 
vice  versa  because  of  this  identity.  Every  gift  or  aid  within  God's 
power  to  bestow  really  comes  from  the  generic  soul  of  the  race  within 
us,  be  it  guidance,  inspiration,  help,  wisdom,  or  energy.  Converse 
with  it  is  converse  with  God,  and  alienation  from  it  is  separation  from 
him. 

In  fine,  our  religion  has  only  three  themes.  The  first  is  Jesus, 
the  ideal  yet  historic  individual  who  goes  through  the  typical  stages 
of  adjustment  to  the  deeper  racial  soul  within  him.  The  incidents  of 
his  Ufe  are  paradigms,  and  the  teachings  directions  how  to  Uve  for 
and  in  the  race.  His  end  illustrates  the  extremest  sacrifice  the  in- 
dividual can  be  called  upon  to  make  for  it.  The  soul  of  the  race  spoke 
through  him  more  and  more  as  his  life  unfolded,  and  when  it  had  used 
all  that  was  in  liim,  flung  him  aside  in  a  way  the  story  of  which  makes 
it  the  quintessence  of  all  great  tragedy. 

Second,  Christ  the  Messiah  is  the  soul  of  the  ancient  Hebrew  race 


444  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

as  they  conceived  it.  Great  souls  among  them  hoped  for  a  unipersonal 
embodiment  of  it,  and  that  the  hovering  ideal  of  it  might  actually  en- 
ter history  in  flesh  and  blood.  The  more  Jesus  sought  to  incarnate 
this  ideal  of  his  stirp,  the  more  under  his  influence  and  that  of  Paul  and 
his  other  successors  the  conception  of  the  totemic  race-man  broadened 
into  that  of  a  type-man  of  the  entire  human  race,  the  concept  necessa- 
rily becoming  that  of  a  true  Son  of  Man.  Jesus'  life  is  to  prepare  his 
followers  to  make  their  own  personal  lives  and  character  conform  to 
the  larger  dimensions  of  humanity  itself. 

Third  and  back  of  man,  is  the  cosmos.  The  Semitic  Yahveh, 
originally  the  deity  of  a  Kenite  tribe,  grew  in  the  minds  of  the  prophets 
till  he  took  on  more  or  less  cosmic  dimensions.  He  became  the  anthro- 
pomorphized and  personified  universe,  its  Creator  and  the  embodiment 
of  all  that  was  good  in  it.  His  golden  age,  which  culminated  with  the 
later  prophets,  began  to  wane  toward  a  twilight  or  Gbtterddmmeriing 
under  two  influences,  first  because  the  above  Jesus-Christ  cult,  to 
which  the  New  Testament  and  the  early  Church  were  devoted,  stressed 
man  and  neglected  nature;  and  second,  because  the  spiritualization  of 
ideas  of  God  and  the  vastation  of  his  nature  in  expanding  from  Yahveh 
to  the  God  of  all  the  worlds,  the  conception  of  which  grew  with  the 
centuries,  and  especially  since  the  men  of  science,  made  him  too 
vast,  vague,  and  afar  to  be  grasped  by  any  powers  of  man,  so 
that  now  he  is  only  dimly  felt  as  a  kind  of  "cosmic  emotion"  or  an 
all-pervading  power  perhaps  inspiring  love  of  nature.  The  intellect 
does  sorry  work  in  seeking  to  make  him  apprehensible,  whether  in  the 
form  of  theology  or  in  conceptions  of  a  controlling  and  perhaps  inter- 
fering Providence,  and  for  the  rest  falls  back  on  poetry  and  antique 
mythology  for  its  symbols  and  imagery. 

(e)  Even  Jesus'  death  brought  to  his  followers  at  first  no  glimmer 
of  insight  into  who  he  or  what  his  Kingdom  was.  They  not  only  made 
no  effort  to  save  him  (unless  the  story  of  Peter's  impulsive  and  foolish 
act  be  authentic),  but  deserted  him  with  no  sign  of  either  courage  or 
fidelity.  There  is  no  record  of  any  lamentation  or  mourning  on  their 
part.  Peter  denied  all  acquaintance  with  him  to  others,  and  if  he 
wept  afterward  with  remorse,  he  did  it  in  secret.  Socrates'  friends 
stood  by  him  to  the  end,  and  so  did  those  of  many  a  Christian  martyr 
afterward,  but  the  disciples  of  Jesus  hardly  seem  to  have  shown  com- 
mon human  sympathy  with  him  even  in  Gethsemane.    None  offered 


JESUS'  ESCHATOLOGY  445 

to  come  forward  and  testify  in  his  behalf,  or  even  attended  him  at  the 
trial,  or  came  to  help  him  bear  the  cross  or  tried  to  comfort  him  as  he 
hung  upon  it  or  even  helped  to  bury  him  decently.  Indeed,  the  very 
baldness  of  the  narrative  of  his  death  with  no  attempt  to  improve  the 
rare  opportunities  of  pathos,  which  in  the  death  story  of  so  many  other 
gods  and  heroes  have  been  utilized  with  such  moving  power,  is  itself 
a  cogent  voucher  of  its  historicity.  His  last  cry  might  have  been, 
''Why  have  my  friends  forsaken  me?"  If,  as  is  often  assumed,  the 
motivation  of  the  representation  that  he  died  alone  was  to  enhance 
the  pathos  of  his  own  anguish,  this  end  was  accomplished  at  the  ex- 
pense of  the  loyalty  of  his  disciples.  There  is  no  indication  that  they 
would  not  all  have  been  allowed  to  be  present  to  the  last,  or  that  any 
of  them  sought  to  be.  None  of  them  ever  interceded  with  him  not  to 
die,  nor  did  any  of  them  dream  he  would  arise.  Hence  the  only  infer- 
ence is  that  they  thought  his  death  the  end  of  all,  and  therefore  they 
must  have  felt  that  they  had  fallen  victims  to  his  delusions  and  must 
skulk  back  to  their  own  environments  and  occupations,  sadder  but 
wiser  men.  Instead  of  remembering  him  with  pride  and  joy  it  would 
be  with  mortification.  If  Jesus  had  hoped  his  death  would  bring  the 
insights  he  had  so  longed  for  or  that  he  would  be  rehabilitated  in  their 
souls  for  what  they  knew  he  was,  he  was  doomed  to  bitter  disappoint- 
ment; for  even  in  this  forlorn  hope  all  the  Christianity  there  was  in  the 
world  seemed  dead  forever  and  submerged  in  obloquy.  The  acme  of 
the  pathos  of  it  all  is  not  Gethsemane,  the  indignity  of  the  trial,  the 
nailing  on  the  cross,  or  even  the  death  in  despair,  but  the  simple  record 
that  his  disciples  having  heard  the  rumours  of  his  Resurrection  re- 
garded them  as  "idle  tales  and  beheved  them  not."  This  signified 
that  all  the  efforts  of  Jesus  to  have  himself  and  his  Kingdom  recog- 
nized by  them  had  finally  aborted,  and  that  in  this  last  crucial  moment 
he  was  found  to  be  dead  indeed,  buried  in  a  rock  he  himself  had  hewn 
out  in  their  own  stony  hearts,  and  sealed  up  there  forever.  This  was 
the  nadir  of  the  diaspora  of  the  Christian  story.  The  disciples 
merely  played  a  role  not  unlike  that  sometimes  assigned  to  the  chorus 
in  Greek  tragedy,  serving  as  a  foil  to  deepen  the  pathos  of  the  hero's 
suffering  by  contrast.  If  the  Jews  and  Romans  slew  Jesus'  body, 
the  stolidity  and  obtuseness  of  his  disciples  slew  his  soul.  Their 
inner  apathy  withstood  even  Jesus'  final  appeal  to  awake,  open  their 
eyes,  realize,  believe.    AU  the  many  reproaches  uttered  by  Jesus  con- 


446  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

cerning  hardness  of  heart,  incapacity  of  soul  or  of  senses,  although  di- 
rected to  others,  were  meant  for  and  merited  by  them.  He  hoped  they 
would  be  the  hght  of  the  world,  but  they  extinguished  his  light  in  dark- 
ness. His  tomb  was  their  adamantine  hearts,  in  which  all  his  work 
and  words,  and  even  his  memory,  were  sealed  and  guarded,  to  perish 
in  obHvion. 

This  is  the  true  story  of  Jesus  to  the  end.  It  is  aU  natural  and 
normal,  and  what  seems  supernatural  is  in  fact  only  our  common 
humanity  raised  to  a  higher  power,  ideally  developed  and  circumstanced 
to  evolve  its  noblest  possibilities.  Its  seemingly  miraculous  factors 
are  all  those  of  degree  and  not  of  kind,  for  there  are  no  specifically 
heteronomous  elements,  and  hence  all  are  within  the  ranges  of  human 
experience  and  also  of  apperception,  if  only  our  powers  of  sympathetic 
imagination  and  moral  Einfiihkmg,  once  given  the  technical  name  of 
faith  and  in  which  true  humanity  culminates,  are  kept  alive  and  active. 
The  new  marvel  and  reality  of  it  all  is  that  it  is  so  true  to  the  psychol- 
ogy of  human  nature  at  its  very  best;  for  it  depicts  the  highest  achieve- 
ment of  which' it  is  capable,  and  by  the  degree  of  approximation  to 
which  every  other  great  achievement  of  man  is  to  be  measured  and 
graded. 

We  now  come,  however,  to  the  true  marvel  and  miracle  which 
psychology  is  not  able  fully  to  explain  or  even  to  understand,  viz., 
how  the  belief  in  Jesus'  Resurrection  arose.  Renan  makes  Christian- 
ity begin  in  the  imagination  of  a  single  woman,  that  she  had  seen  his 
wraith.  Others  think  Peter  first  saw  an  apparition  of  him  and  that 
his  experience  became  contagious,  while  others  suggest  that  Paul's 
vision  on  the  way  to  Damascus  may  have  been  the  most  important 
factor  in  the  development  of  this  great  belief.  Of  course  some  assume 
a  veritable  ghost.  Discrediting  this  last  view,  however,  along  with 
the  crass  conception  of  ancient  orthodoxy  of  a  reanimated  corpse,  and 
even  discarding  the  theory  of  recovery  from  suspended  animation,  the 
problem  of  psychology  is  how  without,  or  even  granting,  the  last 
three  views,  the  earliest  Christians  came  to  believe,  and  withal  so 
passionately,  in  such  an  irrational  and  inconceivable  thing.  Would  it 
have  been  possible  for  any  kind  or  degree  of  human  testimony  to  con- 
vince one  who  had  not  seen  it  of  its  truth,  even  had  it  occurred  as  a 
physical  event?  Or  could  one  who  had  actually  seen  a  dead  man  come 
back  to  life  fully  accept  the  evidence  of  his  own  senses?    Would  not 


JESUS'  ESCHATOLOGY  447 

such  an  experience,  in  fact,  be  like  a  foreign  body  in  his  consciousness, 
unassimilated  by  it?  If  this  would  not  have  been  the  case  then  and 
there,  in  minds  that  had  accepted  beUef  in  other  restorations  to  life  so 
that  it  would  not  be  without  precedent,  nevertheless  the  modern  mind 
would  balk  at  such  a  surd,  however  attested.  Granted  the  fact,  the 
acceptance  of  it  would  itself  be  another  psychological  miracle.  There- 
fore there  is  no  alternative  save  to  seek  what  explanation  we  can  of 
what  took  place  in  the  minds  of  Peter  and  Paul  that  made  them  be- 
lieve; for  if  we  ever  find  a  key  to  it  all,  it  must  be  here.  Despite 
Peter's  impetuous  attestation  at  Caesarea  Philippi,  the  objective  envis- 
agement  of  the  risen  Jesus  must  have  marked  a  crisis  in  his  soul  second 
in  significance  only  to  that  of  Paul's  vision.  Are  there  any  known 
psychic  laws  by  which  to  explain  this  experience,  or  any  modern  analo- 
gies that  shed  light  upon  any  factors  of  it?  Or  is  the  mystery  of  it 
still  entirely  and  hopelessly  beyond  our  ken? 

From  the  unharmonizable  records  of  the  Resurrection,  the  point 
on  which  there  is  most  agreement  is  the  resistance  in  the  minds  of  the 
disciples  to  accepting  it.  Luke  names  three  women -"and  other  wo- 
men" who  told  "  these  things  "  to  the  apostles,  "  and  their  words  seemed 
to  them  as  idle  tales  and  they  believed  them  not,"  although  the  Fourth 
Gospel  says  John  and  Peter  had  seen  the  empty  tomb.  Even  these 
two,  we  are  told,  "knew  not  the  Scriptures  that  he  must  rise  again 
from  the  dead."  Mark  says  Jesus  first  appeared  to  the  Magdalene, 
a  neurotic  out  of  whom  Jesus  had  cast  seven  devils.  John  says  she 
knew  him  not  at  first  but  mistook  him  for  the  gardener.  When  upon 
his  reproof  she  did  recognize  him,  he  forbade  her  to  touch  him,  al- 
though he  later  made  Thomas  do  so.  Jesus  told  her,  as  the  angel  had 
done  before,  to  tell  the  disciples.  Mark  says,  "And  they,  when  they 
had  heard  that  he  was  alive  and  had  been  seen  of  her,  beUeved  not." 
Still  they  seem  to  have  gone  to  Gahlee  as  he  directed,  either  to  resume 
their  old  fife  or  to  accept  the  rendezvous  he  there  appointed.  Of  the 
two  disciples  he  met  on  the  way  to  Emmaus,  Mark  says  he  was  "in 
another  form";  Luke  says  "their  eyes  were  holden  that  they  should 
not  know  him."  He  calmed  their  fears,  explained  the  prophets,  and 
only  later  as  they  sat  at  table  did  the  disciples  know  him,  and  then  he 
vanished.  Mark  says  he  "upbraided  them  with  their  unbeUef  and 
hardness  of  heart  because  they  believed  not  them  which  had  seen  him 
after  he  was  arisen,"  and  says  "they  went  and  told  it  to  the  residue; 


448  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

neither  believed  they  them."  When  he  appeared  in  the  midst  of 
them  and  said,  "Peace  be  unto  you,"  Luke  says  that  "they  were  terri- 
fied and  af righted  and  supposed  that  they  had  seen  a  spirit."  He 
showed  his  hands  and  feet,  and  told  them  to  "handle"  him,  and  re- 
minded them  that  "a  spirit  hath  not  flesh  and  bones  as  ye  see  me 
have."  "They  yet  beheved  not  for  joy,  and  wondered."  Then  he 
ate  before  them,  as  if  to  still  further  prove  his  physical  reality,  and  re- 
peated his  old  teachings,  partly  as  if  for  further  identification,  again 
explaining  how  he  had  to  suffer,  die,  and  rise.  Thomas  later  had  to 
be  given  a  special  private  tactile  demonstration  of  Jesus'  corporeity 
and  identity.  Matthew  tells  of  another  appearance  on  an  appointed 
mountain,  and  adds,  "and  when  they  saw  him  they  worshipped  him; 
but  some  doubted."  Finally  John  says,  "none  of  the  disciples  durst 
ask  him  'Who  art  thou?'  knowing  that  it  was  the  Lord." 

It  is  hard  to  understand  how  a  being  who  could  talk  and  eat, 
whose  body  bore  wounds  of  the  Crucifixion,  and  also  who  could  be 
touched  and  who  discoursed  on  wonted  themes  with  his  friends,  should 
have  such  difficulty  in  convincing  his  followers,  to  whom  the  Resur- 
rection from  the  dead  was  no  new  theme,  either  of  his  reahty  or  of 
his  identity  as  really  risen.  This  shows  how  completely  they  had 
accepted  his  death.  According  to  the  records  he  did  not  regard  himself 
as  a  ghost,  or  wish  them  to  do  so.  Were  he  merely  this,  the  tomb  need 
not  have  been  empty,  for  he  could  have  passed  through  its  walls  with 
no  need  of  having  the  stone  rolled  away  just  as  he  passed  through 
closed  doors,  and  gravity  would  not  have  to  be  reversed  for  him  to 
ascend.  Two  causes  worked  toward  facilitating  their  behef  in  his 
Resurrection,  first  a  strong  wish  and  will  to  believe  it,  for  when  it  was 
fully  accepted  joy  abounded  in  their  hearts,  as  we  see  later  at  Pentecost, 
and  secondly,  they  had  not  actually  seen  him  die  or  seen  him  buried. 
These  experiences,  as  psychic  research  statistics  show,  strongly  tend 
to  prevent  survivors  from  thinking  or  dreaming  that  they  see  the  ghosts 
of  their  just-dead  friends.  Personal  experience  with  these  last  sad 
scenes  tends  thus  to  lay  ghosts,  because  it  brings  home  to  even  the  un- 
conscious regions  of  the  soul,  whence  ghosts  chiefly  arise,  a  realization 
that  friends  are  finally  and  completely  dead.  Had  the  disciples  actu- 
ally seen  him  crucified,  expire,  and  sealed  up  in  a  tomb,  and  had  they 
helped  in  these  last  rites,  they  might  never  have  been  able  to  accept 
the  full  belief  that  he  lived  again.    As  it  was,  this  belief  hung  for  critical 


JESUS'  ESCHATOLOGY  449 

moments,  hours  or  days,  in  suspense.  This  hesitation  can  only  mean 
one  thing,  viz.,  that  the  sum  total  of  all  their  impressions  of  Jesus  as  a 
companion  had  to  undergo  a  great  transformation  before  they  could 
accept  their  friend  and  teacher  as  the  Messiah,  as  he  must  be  if  he  had 
really  returned  from  the  grave.  The  discrepancy  between  what  they 
had  formerly  thought  of  him  and  the  way  in  which  he  must  now  be 
regarded,  in  the  light  of  this  great  achievement,  was  too  wide  to  be 
bridged  suddenly.  Either  there  had  been  less  in  his  deeds,  traits, 
and  teachings  that  was  calculated  to  make  them  believe  him  super- 
mortal  than  the  record  tells  us,  or  else  they  were  dense  and  unimpressed 
to  this  effect  by  intercourse  with  him,  or  perhaps  both.  Before  they 
had  only  day-dreamed  of  his  dignity,  and  now  it  was  hard  to  awaken  to 
it  as  a  reality;  for  to  accept  it  meant  radically  to  revise  all  their  mem- 
ories and  estimates  of  him.  This  involved  very  much  inner  work  or 
travail  of  soul;  and  it  would  in  a  sense  put  him  farther  away  from  be- 
cause so  much  above  them,  for  their  whilom  friend  would  thus  be 
transformed  into  a  deity.  Recognition  of  him  as  the  latter  would 
involve,  too,  a  painful  realization  of  their  own  stupidity  when  he  was 
in  full  flesh  and  blood  with  them.  Moreover,  to  rest  everything  upon 
something  so  incredible,  "to  the  Jews  a  stumbUng-block  and  to  the 
Greeks  foolishness,"  would  be  a  salto  mortale  that  would  most  flaunt- 
ingly  challenge  doubt  and  draw  ridicule  upon  their  work,  for  they 
would  be  thought  credulous,  superstitious,  ignorant,  and  fanatical, 
if  not  victims  of  insane  delusions.  Such  an  avowal  would  mean  to 
enlist  in  a  most  arduous  world  campaign  of  propagating  a  cult  to  accept 
which  would  involve  a  reversal  of  all  current  values,  to  call  men  to 
hate  what  they  had  loved  and  burn  what  they  had  worshipped,  and 
persecution  must  have  at  least  vaguely  and  half  unconsciously  been 
forefelt.    The  issue  was  indeed  staggering. 

But  if  it  was  hard  to  beheve  and  cast  all  resistances  to  the  wind, 
it  was  harder  yet  not  to  do  so.  Whatever  the  nature  of  the  sense- 
presentiments  they  may  have  had  of  his  post-mortem  return,  however 
faint  they  may  have  been,  these  could  not  fail  to  arouse  a  mass  of 
affective  tendencies  in  their  favour.  Presentiments  of  his  greatness, 
which  they  had  felt  before  but  which  had  been  so  effectively  suppressed, 
now  burst  through  or  at  least  strained  every  leash  that  held  them  from 
complete  realization.  What  his  death  may  have  made  them  think 
had  been  the  result  of  his  folly,  now  was  triumphantly  vindicated  as 


450  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

tranicendent  wisdom.  The  wishes  and  hopes  they  had  hardly  dared 
to  indulge  now  made  their  hearts  bound  and  burn  within  them  because 
they  might  become  true.  The  optative  passed  into  the  indicative 
mood.  The  teachings  they  had  warmed  to  were  not  false  but  true. 
If  there  was  even  mortal  danger  it  would  reck  Httle,  because  the  king 
of  terrors  had  himself  been  slain,  for  death  was  gain  and  not  the  loss  of 
all.  Item  after  item  of  their  reminiscences  of  him  began  instinctively 
to  be  illuminated  by  higher  meanings.  Belated  and  arrested  responses 
to  his  insistent  incitements  began  to  find  voice  within  them.  More- 
over, such  extreme  depression  as  they  had  lately  experienced  had  to 
react  toward  the  opposite  of  euthymia.  The  skeptical  consciousness 
could  not  maintain  itself  against  the  affirmations  that  arose  from  the 
submerged  momentum  of  the  cumulative  impressions  he  had  left  upon 
their  deeper  and  better  nature.  So  at  last  all  breakwaters  of  reserve 
and  doubt  wxre  swept  away  by  a  rising  tide  of  belief,  and  in  tliis  meagre 
account  we  have  the  story  of  how  the  current  of  history  began  to  flow 
in  new  channels.  It  was  as  if  the  world  waited  in  breathless  suspense 
for  a  moment  to  see  whether  these  GaHlean  peasants  would  come  to  be- 
lieve or  not  to  believe  that  their  dead  master  had  come  back  to  hfe. 

The  full  conviction  that  Jesus  had  risen,  slow,  hard  and  revolu- 
tionary as  it  was,  dawned  apace.  Many  came  to  beUeve  that  they  had 
seen  and  recognized  him  on  various  but  always  brief  occasions.  It 
was  a  fulfilment  of  an  intense,  deep,  and  more  or  less  unconscious  wish, 
which,  if  strong  enough,  always  finds  or  makes  its  own  realization. 
These  were  days  of  expectant  tension  among  the  faithful.  Perhaps 
some  hoped  or  longed  in  vain  for  sight  of  him,  while  to  others  he 
manifested  himself  to  several  senses.  Some,  doubtless,  had  a  sensus 
mimenis^  or  a  feeling  of  personal  presence  or  reveniance  that  was  not 
defined.  Indeed,  when  not  seen  he  might  be  among  them,  and  some 
might  expect  a  visitation  at  any  place  and  any  moment.  Some  beheved 
on  testimony,  while  others  doubted  or  remained  in  suspense.  He 
certainly  showed  no  disposition  to  resume  his  old  relations  with  his 
comrades.  That  and  his  psychophysical  nature  doubtless  seemed  to 
them  to  have  undergone  some  great  change  as  a  result  of  what  he  had 
experienced.  He  could  not  remain  with  them  permanently  on  the 
same  basis  as  before,  not  even  if  he  were  a  mere  Doppelgdnger  of  the 
new  social  consciousness  of  this  group  of  his  whilom  companions.  All 
these  experiences  might  be  a  dream,  while  the  more  sarcous  he  was,  the 


JESUS'  ESCHATOLOGY  451 

more  difficult  it  would  be  for  him  to  maintain  consistently  and  con- 
stantly such  a  falsetto  existence  as  was  now  ascribed  to  him.  There- 
fore the  folk-soulj  since  it  could  not  make  him  more  crass,  had  no  alter- 
native but  to  sublimate  him  still  more,  and  therefore  he  was  made  to 
ascend  beyond  a  cloud  "^ith  an  angeUc  promise  that  he  would  sooner  or 
later  return  from  thence.  Thus  he  also  vanished  from  the  present  into 
the  future  tense,  and  this  is  interpreted  as  return  to  his  former  home, 
from  which  he  watches  and  guides  until  he  comes  back  in  power  and 
glor}'.  Thus  the  cycle  is  complete,  and  his  followers  must  turn  from 
gazing  up  into  heaven,  reahze  and  assimilate  their  experiences,  and 
orient  themselves  and  agree  upon  some  practical  program  as  the 
entire  apostohc  college  straightway  began  to  do  under  Peter's  guidance.^ 

And  now  the  full  meaning  of  all  their  experiences  as  a  whole,  from 
their  call  in  Galilee  to  the  cloud  that  shut  Jesus  from  their  \'iew,  came 
over  them.  All  seem  suddenly  and  at  once  to  have  realized  what  Jesus 
took  himself  to  be  and  really  was  while  he  was  -v^ith  them.  All  that  he 
had  striven,  even  to  the  tragic  end,  to  make  them  realize  concerning 
himself,  but  hitherto  in  vain,  burst  upon  them.  Jesus'  great  secret 
stood  forth  revealed  to  them  in  all  its  significance.  Were  he  among 
them  at  this  moment,  there  would  be  no  longer  any  reason  or  cause  for 
his  long  painful  reticences,  reser\^es,  inhibitions,  and  fears  to  avow 
himself.  His  ovvTi  sense  of  di\dnity  could  be  indulged  in  without  Hmit 
in  this  little  new  circle.  At  last  he  was  discovered  and  understood  for 
what  he  really  was.  His  death,  supplemented  by  experiences  that 
indicated  his  reveniance  from  it,  had  consummated  in  their  souls  his 
work  while  with  them,  and  his  supreme  'uish  and  desire  for  them  were 
now  realized.  The  crude  s}Tnbolism  and  imager^'  of  Pentecost  and  the 
account  of  the  gift  of  the  Paraclete  mark  the  arrival  of  Jesus'  followers 
at  the  goal  of  Jesus'  chief  endeavour  for  them.  The  supreme  act 
of  the  Holy  Spirit  is  in  its  very  essence  establishing  behef  in  the  Resur- 
rection and  all  that  it  impHes,  and  this  is  described  as  the  gift  of  the 
Holy  Ghost.  Christian  faith  was  invented  as  the  special  organ  of  this 
function,  and  it  has  no  other  content.  The  Spirit  designates  a  high 
degree  of  the  energy^  by  which  that  organ  does  its  work. 

If  this  little  band  had  merely  dreamed  or  hallucinated  their  late 
companion  back  from  death  and  up  to  the  Father,  and  if  such  a  com- 
plex had  once  become  firmly  estabhshed  in  their  minds,  even  as  a 

IK.  Lake:  "The  Historical  Evidence  for  the  Resurrection  of  Jesus  Christ."    New  York,  1907,  291  p. 


452  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

foreign  body  forced  upon  their  credence  from  without  by  the  insistence 
of  false  sensations,  then  a  process  of  assimilation  and  intussusception 
would  have  at  once  begun  about  such  an  apperception  mass,  or  else 
mental  unity  and  integrity  would  be  lost.  Rapid  as  this  process  of 
unification  was,  and  far  as  it  went,  it  has  never  yet  been  completed, 
so  that  the  Christian  consciousness  has  always  remained  more  or  less 
dual,  and  flesh  and  spirit,  sight  and  faith,  this  world  and  the  next, 
have  always  stood  more  or  less  over  against  each  other.  Jesus  from 
this  point  on,  too,  in  a  pecuHar  sense  has  had  two  lives,  one  in  humilia- 
tion and  the  other  in  exaltation,  and  in  these  two  states  the  old  antith- 
esis between  the  real  and  the  ideal  took  a  new  and  most  pragmatic 
form.  Now  the  pneumatic  took  great  and  sudden  precedence  over  the 
sarcous.  Now  the  unseen  and  transcendent  dominated  the  seen  and 
immanent  world  as  never  before.  The  body  and  present  life  waned 
before  the  soul  and  the  next  life.  This  momentous  change  was  wrought 
out,  not  by  eschatology  alone,  but  was  chiefly  caused  by,  and,  indeed, 
consisted  in,  accepting  the  Resurrection,  which  is  the  fons  et  origo  of 
Christian  ideahsm.  The  old  Greek  unity  and  harmony  between  soul 
and  body  were  gone,  and  henceforth  man  was  predominantly  soul, 
and  body  only  in  a  secondary  sense.  The  leader  of  this  little  band  had 
documented  himself  beyond  all  cavil  as  a  celestial  being  for  whom 
death  was  only  an  emancipator,  and  they  were  not  only  of  his  race  but 
his  intimates,  and  therefore,  like  him,  celestial  and  deathless.  In 
discovering  what  he  really  was  they  discovered  what  they  were  and 
also  what  others  could  become.  Never  before  had  humble  or  even 
exalted  men  thought  so  highly  of  themselves.  What  matters  it  to  us, 
now  that  the  old  theology  of  a  vicarious  atonement  has  lost  its  power, 
just  how  much  of  the  Resurrection  was  material  fact,  and  how  much 
was  product  of  a  highly  wrought  imagination?  Belief  in  it  has  done 
and  will  long  continue  to  do  its  work,  and  so  it  is  most  real  by  every 
pragmatic  sanction.  Henceforth  soul  cults  were  not  only  detached 
from  but  made  far  superior  to  body  cults. 

Thus  the  Holy  Spirit,  which  was  the  soul  of  the  dead  Jesus,  passed 
into  his  successors.  Thus  at  last  on  the  day  of  Pentecost  they  caught 
his  inspiration  and  came  for  the  first  time  into  vital  rapport  with  him, 
and  their  lesser  minds  were  frenzied  by  the  muse  from  heaven  which 
he  had  sent  them.  In  the  aura  of  their  ecstasy  their  over-wrought  eyes, 
which  had  lately  seemed  to  see  the  spectral  form  of  their  Lord,  now  saw 


JESUS'  ESCHATOLOGY  453 

red  flickering  flames  over  one  another's  heads  as  symbols  of  their  new- 
enlightenment,  and  perhaps  of  fiery  tongues  to  proclaim  it.  Their 
ears  rang  as  the  wind  pipes,  as  if  a  new  spirit  of  the  air  were  abroad. 
Instead  of  Ustening  to  the  risen  Master's  words  they  heard  one  another 
in  an  access  of  glossolaha,  speaking  strange  tongues,  as  if  of  the  races 
they  were  about  to  preach  the  Gospel  to.  They  raved  like  frantic 
sybils  when  the  mantic  spirit  enters  them,  and  these  all  seem  to  have 
been  phenomena  which  Jesus  had  never  anticipated.  They  were 
indeed  drunk,  not  with  new  wine,  but  with  the  new  mystery  of  the 
Resurrection  and  what  it  imphed,  and  with  the  burden  which  they  felt 
was  now  laid  upon  their  souls  to  rescue  others  from  their  own  long 
ignorance  and  density.  Through  all  these  pregnant  days  before  the 
apostles  dispersed,  Peter  stands  forth  as  the  great  leader  and  compeller 
of  souls.  He  tempered  their  crude  and  wild  enthusiasm  and  gave  it 
practical  directions,  informed  their  zeal  with  wisdom,  rehearsed  the 
outline  of  Jewish  history  as  it  must  henceforth  seem  in  this  new  light, 
established  community  of  goods,  gave  object  lessons  in  healing  as  well 
as  teaching,  in  confuting  enemies  and  unmasking  pretenders,  making 
with  their  novice  aid  thousands  of  converts,  steeling  their  courage  by 
his  own  heroism  to  meet  persecution,  in  his  vision  of  the  sheet  trans- 
cending the  narrow  limits  of  Judaism  and  insisting  that  the  great 
message  was  for  all  the  gentile  world,  and  by  this  and  many  other 
means  developing  step  by  step  the  primitive  apostolic  constitution. 

The  second  and  only  other  great  miracle  in  the  New  Testament, 
also  psycholbgical,  is  the  conversion  of  Paul,  who  experienced  his 
Pentecost  on  the  way  to  Damascus,  which  made  him  another  Neander 
or  new  man  with  a  new  name,  as  Peter  was  renamed.  His  change  also 
is  not  entirely  inexplicable  or  supernatural.  About  Jesus'  own  age, 
he  was  born  in  Tarsus,  a  cosmopohtan  trade  and  also  an  academic  city, 
so  that  he  may  have  "  drunk  from  the  springs  of  Helicon  as  well  as  frorn 
those  of  Zion,"  although  it  was  also  the  seat  of  Baal  worship  with  its 
rank  orgies.  About  the  age  and  time  when  Jesus  first  visited  the 
temple,  Paul  went  to  Jerusalem  and  studied  the  Scriptures  with  Gama- 
liel, a  Pharisee  of  great  learning  and  breadth  of  mind,  who  was  said 
to  have  counselled  the  Jews  not  to  persecute  the  Christians  because  if 
their  cause  was  of  man  it  would  come  to  naught,  and  if  of  God  they 
could  not  exterminate  it.  He  had  consented  to  and  seen  the  death  of 
Stephen  calling  upon  God  to  forgive  those  who  slew  him.    He  inherited 


454  JESUS   IN  THE   LIGHT   OF   PSYCHOLOGY 

Roman  citizenship  from  a  prominent  father,  and  was  a  man  of  rare 
vigour  of  mind  and  body.  His  rabbinical  training  and  temperament 
made  him  a  zealous  proselyter,  and  he  may  have  secretly  hoped  to  see 
Judaism  pervade  the  Roman  world,  at  least  in  the  East.  The  rapidly 
growing  Christian  community,  however,  endangered  this  ideal,  and  so 
he  became  the  most  active  antagonist  that  we  know  of  this  new  sect.  He 
persecuted  its  members  from  place  to  place  with  relentless  cruelty  and 
fanaticism,  commissioned  by  the  rulers  and,  as  he  thought,  by  God,  to 
crush  out  their  pestiferous  cause.  Had  he  persevered  in  this  work,  the 
very  apostles  might  have  fallen  and  Christianity  have  died  in  its  infancy. 
Many  fled  to  distant  parts  for  fear  of  him,  perhaps  sowing  the  good  seed 
afar  which  Paul  was  destined  later  to  help  them  cultivate. 

But  now  occurred  an  event  of  which  it  is  impossible  to  harmonize 
the  various  accounts.  According  to  the  more  objective  versions  of  it 
made  by  others,  Paul  was  on  a  six  days'  journey  of  some  one  hundred 
and  sixty  miles,  across  a  desert,  a  condition  favourable  for  orientation, 
when  in  the  oppressive  heat  of  noontide  he  seemed  to  see  a  great  light 
more  dazzling  than  that  of  the  sun,  and  to  hear  a  voice  which  he  ascribed 
to  the  risen  Jesus  saying,  "Why  persecutest  thou  me?"  He  fell 
blinded  and  perhaps  unconscious,  was  led  to  a  retreat,  fasted 
three  days,  then  recovered  his  sight,  and  we  hear  nothing  of  him  for 
some  years.  Commentators  have  conjectured  sunstroke,  a  very- 
heavy  and  near  thunderbolt,  somnolence,  a  startling,  painful  dream 
with  nightmare  symptoms,  or  an  access  of  epilepsy.  There  is  much 
diversity  in  the  record,  nor  do  we  know  just  what,  if  anything,  his 
companions  saw  or  heard.  Paul's  own  allusions  to  this  experience  are 
less  dramatic  and  objective,  but  make  it  no  less  epochal,  for  he  there 
met  the  risen  Jesus  and  was  transformed  in  doing  so.  The  subject  of 
such  experiences  can  never  give  any  very  lucid  account  of  what  befell 
him,  but  has  to  be  content  with  somewhat  futile  tropes  and  symbols. 
Whatever  the  spectral  and  phonic  features  here  are,  it  is  certain  that 
we  can  never  get  very  far  away  from  the  sphere  of  subjectivity. 
Hence,  the  all-important  thing  is  not  what  occurred  but  how  Paul 
interpreted  this  crisis,  which  was  that  he  had  actually  envisaged  in  the 
spiritual  and  risen  form  the  very  Jesus  whose  followers  he  was  perse- 
cuting, and  had  experienced  a  kind  of  transporting  ethical  narcosis  in 
his  presence,  which  left  him  both  fascinated  and  dismayed.  The 
Christophany  vouchsafed  him  had  inebriated  him  with  an  ideal  of 


JESUS'  ESCHATOLOGY  455 

transcendent  and  triumphant  virtue,  far  above  that  which  he  had  long 
striven  to  attain  in  himself  but  in  vain.  He  had  seen  the  second  spirit- 
ual Adam,  the  Christ  than  whom  he  thenceforth  resolved  to  know 
nothing  else,  but  he  must  take  up  his  abode  in  him  and  also  unite  him 
with  God.  But  such  interpretations  did  not  come  on  the  instant, 
but  later,  as  a  product  of  years  of  meditation  which  were  necessary  to 
assimilate  such  a  new  and  anomalous  ej^erience.  He  had  to  recon- 
struct in  a  new  form  all  his  shattered  views  of  life,  and  to  recover 
complete  sanity  after  a  shock  that  seemed  to  have  destroyed  his 
old  personality  and  to  have  established  a  new  one  within  him,  viz., 
that  of  Christ  that  had  exorcised  the  truculent  demon  of  persecution  in 
him  and  taken  its  place. 

Was  this  experience,  or  the  volte-face  it  caused,  a  miracle,  or  only 
a  challenging  but  not  insoluble  psychic  enigma?  In  the  years  of 
retreat  and  incubation,  perhaps  soHtary  and  possibly  convalescent, 
Paul  could  not  help  recalling  his  mingled  feelings  as  he  had  seen 
Stephen's  death,  and  also  as  he  remembered  the  mild  and  tolerant 
teachings  of  his  old  preceptor.  The  "pricks"  which  he  found  it  hard 
to  kick  against  were  those  of  his  own  conscience.  It  was  very  doubtful 
whether  either  the  Sanhedrin  or  the  best  elements  in  the  Judaism  of  Paul's 
day  would  have  sanctioned  his  truculence,  or  whether  the  group  of  believers 
in  Christ  was  large  or  formidable  enough  to  be  a  source  of  great  danger; 
and  certainly  the  spirit  of  the  great  prophets  would  have  condemned 
such  persecution.  It  may  have  been  prompted  by  slanderous  reports 
about  the  new  sect,  which,  however,  their  bearing  under  his  cruelties 
was  doubtless  tending  to  discredit.  The  above  facts  constitute  an 
ensemble  of  influences  that  before  the  expedition  to  Damascus  were 
undermining  and  repressing  his  antagonism,  and  so  preparing  the  way 
for  a  revolt  in  his  soul  against  the  course  he  was  pursuing.  The  ma- 
jority of  his  impulses  was  warring  against  a  silent  but  growing  minority 
of  them  which  was  soon  to  come  to  power. 

(a)  But  other  more  personal  preformations  of  the  impending 
change  we  find  in  the  extreme  moral  dualism  that  characterized  his  life. 
His  whole  soul  longed  and  strove  for  righteousness  under  the  law,  but 
he  found  great  resistance  in  the  "flesh."  His  spirit  craved  and  strove 
for  God  and  purity,  but  the  lust  of  his  members  always  stood  in  the  way 
till  he  prayed  to  be  delivered  from  the  "body  of  death."  The  strength 
of  his  ethical  nature  made  him  aspire  to  nothing  less  than  moral  per- 


4S6  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

fection,  but  the  requirements  of  the  Hebrew  law  were  complicated  and 
impossible  of  literal  fulfilment,  while  the  impetuous  passions  of  the 
physical  man,  in  which  concupiscence  may  and  may  not  have  played  a 
prominent  part,  made  his  ideals  seem  unattainable.  The  good  that  he 
longed  to  do  he  did  not,  and  the  evil  that  he  hated,  that  he  did.  Thus 
he  interpreted  the  war  within  him  of  the  flesh  with  the  spirit,  although 
how  much  of  this  conflict  was  due  to  exceptionally  high  ideals  of  virtue 
and  how  much  to  exceptional  strength  of  baser  propensities  in  him  we 
do  not  know,  but  both  may  have  been  extreme.  It  was  doubtless  in 
no  small  part  to  relieve  this  inner  strain  that  he  became  a  ravening 
wolf  to  the  Christians,  being  exceedingly  mad  against  them,  breathing 
out  slaughter,  forcing  them  to  blaspheme,  thus  wreaking  upon  them  the 
wrath  he  really  felt  against  his  own  better  nature,  as  anger  is  so 
prone  to  vent  itself  upon  another  object  than  that  which  excites  it, 
by  the  law  of  transference.  He  doubtless  hoped  also  thus  to  atone  by 
supererogatory  zeal  for  his  own  sins. 

In  the  midst  of  this  desperate  struggle  with  himself,  which  he 
always  conceived  as  between  body  and  soul,  or  spirit,  came  the  appari- 
tion of  a  real  discarnate  spirit  that  in  sloughing  off  the  body  had 
escaped  the  source  of  all  sin  and  was  thus  above  the  temptations  that 
racked  his  own  soul.  In  this  he  saw  actualized  before  him  something 
like  that  which  his  own  better  self  had  long  striven  to  become,  and  if 
relieved  of  mortal  errant  flesh  might  approximate.  Identifying  as  he 
did  this  visible  immortaUty  with  the  Great  Teacher  whose  cause  he  in 
his  folly  and  madness  had  sought  to  bring  to  naught,  he  came  to  the 
great  realization  that  what  he  had  persecuted  was  in  fact  in  very  deed 
and  truth  his  own  better  self,  beatified  and  ideaUzed.  This  reproved 
him  and  called  him  to  awake  and  turn.  It  also  gave  him  assurance  of 
victory  in  his  moral  battles,  brought  great  peace  as  that  after  a  long 
storm,  and  inundated  his  soul  with  hope  and  faith.  Paul  conceived  it 
as  an  ecstatic  experience  which  exalted  hun  above  his  old  life  and  filled 
his  soul  with  new  and  unique  joy,  loyalty,  and  devotion.  He  had 
found  his  ideal,  or  rather,  himself  idealized. 

Another  predisposing  cause  of  his  conversion  was  doubtless  con- 
siderable knowledge  of  the  Christian  story  of  the  cross,  and  probably, 
because  they  were  all  about  him,  of  some  of  the  cults  of  dying  and 
rising  gods,  or  of  the  pagan  Christs  with  soteriological  functions,  while 
beneath  all,  like  a  tidal  wave  (that  bears  many  lesser  systems  of  waves 


JESUS*  ESCHATOLOGY  457 

down  to  the  tiniest  ripples  from  a  breeze),  was  the  pendular  nature  of 
his  affective  Hfe  reinforced  by  the  sequence  of  autumn  and  spring, 
which  makes  it  prone  to  swing  over  from  every  extreme  state  into  its 
opposite.  Thus  there  were  in  his  own  soul  disapprovals  of  his  course 
as  persecutor  arising  from  human  sympathy  with  his  victims,  whom  he 
found  to  be  not  wolves  but  lambs,  while  the  violence  he  was  doing  to 
the  more  poised  minds  like  that  of  GamaHel  would  reinforce  the  re- 
action. All  these  inchnations  he  had  doubtless  felt,  fought  down,  or 
sought  to  evict  from  his  consciousness,  and  keep  out  by  setting  a 
censor  over  them,  but  they  persisted  in  coming  back  now  in  great  force. 

(b)  His  personal  struggles  against  sin  and  toward  perfection,  and 
his  high  standards,  which  gave  him  a  horror  of  moral  inferiority  or 
mediocrity,  had  brought  him  to  conceive  his  body  as  the  source  of  all 
iniquity  and  his  spirit  as  the  quintessence  of  all  that  was  good.  Thus 
an  ocular  object-lesson  demonstration  of  a  most  real  and  perfect  soul 
set  free  from  its  sarcous  prison,  was  an  inspiring  vision. 

(c)  Death  and  rebirth  in  all  the  ethnic  cults  went  together  and 
were  eternal  complements  of  each  other.  In  them  what  dies  rises 
again.  The  formula  of  every  tragedy  is  first  pain  and  last  victory. 
The  first  flash  of  synthesis  between  these  hitherto  more  or  less  isolated 
psychic  constellations,  the  life  and  death  of  Jesus  and  that  of  the  pagan 
Christs,  would  cause  a  psycholeptic  crisis  sure  to  moult  the  old  con- 
sciousness and  reveal  the  new  and  better  one  that  was  growing  beneath 
it.  Paul's  experience  is  thus  the  classic  paradigm  in  the  normal  re- 
ligious realm  of  which  there  are  very  many  analogies  but  none  upon  the 
same  high  plane,  e.  g.,  the  crises  of  Constantine,  Augustine,  Bunyan, 
and  many  others  described  in  the  current  psychologies  of  conversion. 
In  mid-adolescence,  e.  g.,  the  larger  life  of  the  race  often  seems  to  burst 
upon  the  youthful  soul  that  has  hitherto  lived  only  in  and  for  itself, 
leading  it  captive  to  the  larger  life  of  the  race  which  demands  service 
and  altruism.  Again,  love  often  has  a  period  of  unconscious  latency  or 
incubation,  during  which  it  may  be  silently  growing  in  the  depths  of 
the  soul  even  toward  the  very  persons  the  subject  of  the  passion  beUeves 
that  he  only  fears,  fights,  and  hates.  So,  too,  those  in  whom  rage  has 
done  its  worst  and  burned  out,  may  turn  to  pity  and  even  love  their 
victims.  Once  more,  it  is  a  pregnant  psychogenetic  law  that  the 
indulgence  of  some  base  propensity  or  a  fall  into  sin  may  arouse  the 
next  higher  power  that  inhibits  and  sublimates  it,  and  so  advance  the 


458  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

wrong-doer  to  a  more  highly  evolved  evolutionary  plane  where,  but 
for  sin,  its  normal  corrective  would  never  have  come  into  function. 
Or  again,  as  toxins  stimulate  the  development  of  antibodies  in  the 
blood,  which  act  as  their  antidote,  so  Paul's  struggles  with  sin  aroused 
the  countervalent  lust  for  holiness  which  could  not  only  give  immunity 
from  wickedness  but  cast  it  out. 

As  a  result  of  this  crisis  Paul's  life  was  shattered  and  lay  in  ruins, 
and  the  new  and  larger  personality  that  was  forming  beneath  merged 
into  his  consciousness;  but  it  was  callow,  inchoate,  fragmentary,  or  like 
early  infancy  when  it  most  needs  protection.  A  larger  synthesis  of 
all  the  above  elements  was  necessary  if  integrity  of  soul  could  be 
attained.  New  theories,  new  directions  of  will,  new  feelings,  must 
be  syncretized  into  a  far  more  complex  unity  and  a  higher  sanity  at- 
tained, or  else  hopeless  disintegration  would  ensue.  All  these  prob- 
lems of  autopsychotherapy  which  Paul  faced  had,  however,  a  remark- 
able solution  in  the  working  out  of  which  he  became  the  world's  great- 
est psychologist  of  the  regenerative  processes.  All  the  many  latencies 
within  him  were  heard  from,  and  in  place  of  the  old  shattered  self 
another  one  that  seemed  to  him  so  much  larger  and  better  that  it 
could  not  be  his  own,  arose.  He  thus  achieved  a  new  and  far 
more  complete  wholeness  or  holiness  above  all  the  old  disharmonies  so 
that  he  was  twice  saved,  once  from  these  and  again  from  the  effects 
of  the  shock  of  his  disruptive  crisis.  The  self-reeducative  and  regener- 
ative powers  of  a  new  ideal  and  a  new  affection  were  thus  supremely 
illustrated  in  the  change  which  turned  Saul  the  inquisitor  into  Paul  the 
apostle,  which  changed  the  slave  of  the  letter  of  the  law  into  the  ex- 
ponent of  a  perfect,  because  not  antinomian,  freedom.  While  we  have 
no  systematic  confessional  of  the  travail  of  Paul's  soul  during  his  silent 
years,  such  as  psychoanalysis  would  desire  for  a  Tathestandsdiagnostik, 
or  even  of  the  kind  represented  by  other  types  of  extreme  changes,  e.  g., 
Rousseau,  Faust,  Hamann,  we  do  have  many  precious  glimpses  in  the 
Pauhne  epistles  of  the  process  of  ^^ fides  quaerens  itttellectum''  or  of  pistis 
seeking  gnosis  like  capital  seeking  investment.  The  problem  he  now 
faced  was,  how  can  the  spirit  of  the  Jesus  whom  he  had  seen,  enter  the  Hfe 
of  man?  By  what  tropes,  analogies,  allegories,  symbols,  rites,  insti- 
tutions, can  this  new  experience  be  expressed  and  inundate  thought, 
feeling,  and  will?  How  can  the  precious  buUion  be  minted  into  cur- 
rent coin  of  the  realm?     It  was  hard  enough  for  Paul  to  come  to  a  full 


JESUS'  ESCHATOLOGY  459 

realization  of  what  had  happened  to  himself,  but  much  harder  to  find 
ways  and  means  of  giving  others,  even  gentiles,  the  benefit  of  the 
heavenly  treasure  he  had  found. 

(i)  Two  chief  means,  however,  were  at  hand.  The  first  was 
gnosticism.  The  point  of  contact  of  the  new  sense  of  Divine  Sonship 
with  gentile  thought  was  first  made  in  the  domain  of  Greek  life  through 
the  medium  of  its  philosophy,  which  had  long  since  demonstrated 
its  efficiency  and  economy  as  a  means  of  grasping  the  universe  as  a 
whole  and  to  which  Hellenic  thought,  from  Anaxagoras  down,  had 
contributed  its  riches.  In  Paul's  day  it  was  most  popularly  known  in  the 
form  of  the  logos  doctrine.  The  Divine  Word  was  conceived  not  only 
as  the  reason  and  wisdom  inherent  in  nature,  but  as  active  in  and  crea- 
tive of  it.  It  bore  to  the  thought  of  that  day  a  relation  very  like  that 
of  thought  in  the  logic  of  Hegel,  only  that  it  was  essentially  trans- 
cendent rather  than  immanent.  The  Word  was  the  rationality  by 
which  things  were  made,  with  at  once  the  archetypal  or  constitutive 
value  of  Plato's  ideas  and  the  normative  or  regulative  force  of  Aris- 
totle's categories.  This  gnosticism  was  the  last  word  of  generations 
of  Greek  thought,  and  gave  to  it  most  of  the  unity  that  it  possessed. 
No  formula  ever  perhaps  had  more  epoch-making  historic  significance 
than  the  simple  equation,  "Jesus  is  the  Logos. ^^  This  pass-word  ad- 
mitted Christianity  to  the  whole  system  of  Greek  thought,  and  irri- 
gated it  with  fertilizing  streams.  It  was  the  basis  of  a  network  of 
theory-  and  demonstration  which  widened  and  irradiated  for  centuries. 
It  opened  all  the  field  prepared  by  the  conquest  of  Alexander  and  gave 
a  personal  positive  moral  content  which  almost  made  the  previous 
culture  of  Greece  appear  to  be  another  propadeutic  Old  Testament 
to  the  new  Gospel.  Greece,  however,  lacked  and  could  not  under- 
stand Messianism,  while  the  Semitic  mind  could  not  conceive  the  iden- 
tification of  an  historic  individual  with  a  metaphysical  principle,  so 
that  the  above  equation  was  as  strange  to  the  Jews  as  it  would  be  to 
us  now  to  equate  him  with,  e.  g.,  science.  This  conception  of  him  as 
the  Logos  later  tended  to  make  enthusiasm  evaporate  into  doctrine  and 
to  put  creed  in  the  place  of  faith  and  theolog>^  in  that  of  religion.  Had 
Christ  been  equated  with  will,  which  makes  conduct,  or  with  the  nisus 
of  evolution  or  the  biologos,  how  different  all  would  have  been! 
But  happily  because  it  was  related  to  the  idea  of  sonship  the  logos 
was  also  conceived  as  spermatic,  and  this  conserved  vital  roots  even 


46o  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

though  they  were  subordinated.  Harnack  may  be  right  in  his  view  that 
it  was  necessary  to  rigidify  orthodoxy  in  order  to  make  headway  against 
polytheism,  idolatry,  and  the  various  heresies,  and  to  estabUsh  a  solid 
basis  for  Church  organization,  but  this  did  not  keep  out  the  theocrasias 
or  prevent  saint  worship  from  taking  the  place  of  polytheism  or  canon- 
ization of  the  apotheosis  of  heroes.  Still  the  psychologist  who  puts 
an  ever  higher  valuation  upon  subjective  processes  and  believes  in  their 
ultimate  triumph  cannot  help  raising  the  question  whether  the  noetic 
element  in  Paul's  exposition  of  the  new  reUgion  was  not  over-emphasized, 
as  would  be  natural  in  a  religion  that  was  propagated  so  intensely 
and  so  largely  by  preaching,  and  whether  his  intellectualization  of  his 
own  experience  was  not  better  calculated  to  make  than  to  hold  con- 
verts. Hard  and  long  as  he  strove  to  do  so,  Paul  never  explained  either 
himself  or  Christ.  He  was  not  a  philosopher  or  clear  thinker  but  a 
mystic,  more  articulate,  to  be  sure,  than  minds  like  Boehme  or  Eck- 
hart,  but  his  mind  was  essentially  ejaculatory,  teeming  with  brilliant 
phrases,  seeing  new  apergus,  rich  in  metaphors  and  even  in  epigrams. 
He  was  a  prose  poet,  often  a  rhapsodist,  and  far  greater  as  an  organizer 
than  as  a  thinker.  It  is  idle  to  seek  in  his  writings  for  evidence  that 
he  had  ever  grasped  the  doctrines  of  the  great  Greek  thinkers,  or  even 
the  essential  principles  of  Stoicism,  of  which  he  seems  to  have  known  as 
little  as  he  did  of  the  Ufe  and  teachings  of  Jesus.  Even  his  gnosticism 
was  only  that  of  a  novice  and  amateur,  and  the  best  that  can  be  said  of 
it  is  that  it  was  sufficient  for  the  immediate  purposes  he  had  in  hand, 
like  a  mariner's  knowledge  of  astronomy. 

(2)  The  other  great  influence  Paul  represented  is  seen  in  the  most 
significant  fact  that  he  knew  Jesus  almost  solely  as  crucified  and  risen, 
and  seems  to  have  known  or  cared  Httle  else  about  him.  From  his 
writings  alone  we  should  know  ahnost  nothing  else  of  Jesus.  Now, 
death  and  revival  were  central  themes  of  most  of  the  religions  of  near 
Asia  and  ancient  Egypt  and  Greece.  The  idea  of  dying  and  reviving 
deities  was  the  root  of  about  all  the  ancient  mysteries.  Back  of  all 
were  the  countless  rites  commemorating  the  death  of  vegetation  in 
the  fall  to  ensure  its  return  in  the  spring,  m  which  autumn  sadness 
ebbs  into  vernal  joy.    Winter  is  driven  out  by  May  queens. 

But  as  culture  advanced,  the  desire  to  secure  vernal  resurrection 
in  plant  life  merged  over  into  that  to  secure  the  revival  of  human  life 
after  death.    Osiris,  originally  the  god  of  vegetation,  was  slain  by  the 


JESUS'  ESCHATOLOGY  461 

demon  of  summer  heat,  personified  as  his  brother  Set.  The  day  of  his 
death  was  celebrated  by  mourning,  which  two  days  later  passed  over 
into  joy  unbounded  at  the  recovery  of  his  body  by  Isis.  So  the  death 
of  Adonis  was  mourned  one  day,  and  the  next  his  resurrection  and 
translation  into  heaven  were  commemorated.  In  some  versions  he, 
like  Persephone,  spends  half  a  year  in  the  underworld,  and  the  other 
half  in  the  upper.  So  Attis,  the  lover  of  Cybele,  the  great  mother, 
mutilated  himself  to  death,  and  this  was  celebrated  symboHcally  by 
the  priest,  who  wounded  his  arm  as  if  to  follow  in  the  footsteps  of  the 
god.  The  fourth  day  came  the  feast  of  joy,  celebrating  his  resurrection. 
The  history  of  Demeter  and  the  recovery  of  her  daughter  were  the 
theme  of  the  Eleusinian  mysteries,  which  are  traced  back  to  spring  and 
fall  myths,  but  later  attained  the  significance  of  a  pledge  of  bHssful  life 
after  death.  Dionysus,  like  Osiris,  with  whom  some  identify  him,  was 
commemorated  by  tearing  a  bull  to  pieces  by  the  teeth  of  the  worship- 
pers who  in  devouring  the  bleeding  flesh  partook  of  the  immortal  Hfe 
of  the  god  incarnated  in  the  bull.  Allied  to  the  violent  deaths  of  the 
gods  are  the  legends  of  the  voluntary  descent  of  a  god  or  hero  to  the 
underworld  and  his  fortunate  return.  The  Babylonian  Ishtar  did  this 
to  restore  her  lover  Thamimuz,  and  again  to  fetch  back  the  waters  of 
life.  She  was  admitted  only  after  threatening  to  break  down  the  doors 
of  hell  and  on  condition  that  she  must  leave  one  garment  at  each  of  the 
heavenly  gates,  so  that  she  entered  the  nether  world  quite  naked. 
She  was  imprisoned  here  and  inflicted  with  sixty  diseases.  This  re- 
moval of  the  goddess  of  fertihty  threatened  to  end  human  and  animal 
life  until  a  hero  was  sent  to  ensure  her  return,  which  she  effected,  re- 
gaining a  garment  at  each  gate.  Thammuz  was  washed  in  the  water 
of  Ufe  and  anointed  with  oil,  and  then  in  place  of  the  death  dirge  came 
merrymaking  with  pipes.  The  gates  of  the  underworld  were  finally 
broken  down  and  the  dead  deUvered  from  their  prison.  In  a  well- 
known  gnostic  hymn  we  are  told  how  the  soul  wanders  in  the  laby- 
rinth of  Ufe  with  no  escape.  Christ  implored  the  Father  to  send  him  to 
its  relief.  So  he  wandered  through  the  aeons,  disclosing  all  secrets, 
delivering  souls  from  Hades,  protecting  them  from  demons  by  mystic 
names  and  formulae.  In  the  Gospel  of  Peter,  Christ  declares  that  he 
had  preached  to  those  that  slept,  meaning  that  between  his  death  and 
Resurrection  he  had  descended  to  hell  and  revealed  himself  as  the  Lord 
of  its  inmates.    Thus  the  hard  yoke  of  death  was  broken,  and  hence 


462  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

the  shouts,  "Death^  where  is  thy  sting?"  The  heavenly  watchmen 
see  the  booty  won  and  cry,  Lift  up  ye  gates  that  the  King  of  Glory 
may  come  in! — gates  which  were  originally  the  ice  and  snow  of  winter. 
So  Odysseus,  Hercules,  Theseus,  and  Pythagoras  descended  to  the 
realms  of  Orcus. 

The  ancients  quite  commonly  deemed  death  a  result  of  super- 
natural causes,  and  for  the  Semites  it  was  a  penalty,  deliveranc'e  from 
which  must  be  either  propitiatory  or  by  vicarious  sacrifice,  in  which  the 
cleansing  power  of  sacred  blood  played  a  great  role.  Death  must  be 
defeated  in  his  stronghold.  Christ  imparts  life  either  by  faith  in  his 
name,  by  baptism,  or  by  the  Lord's  Supper.  The  beHef  that  the  inno- 
cent sufferings  of  the  good  have  great  vicarious  power  first  appeared 
in  Isaiah  liii,  and  again  in  the  Fourth  Book  of  the  Maccabees,  and  it 
dominated  the  Jewish  custom  of  animal  sacrifice.  Among  the  Gr'eeks 
the  placation  of  the  anger  of  the  gods  was  the  motif  of  many  purifica- 
tion rites  in  which  sometimes  human  beings  were  sacrificed,  first 
commonly,  then  annually,  later  at  great  pubhc  calamities.  The  transi- 
tion from  human  to  animal  sacrifice  is  seen  in  Abraham's  offering,  and 
also  in  Iphigenia.  Human  sacrifices  were  very  common  among  the 
Canaanites;  and  everywhere  the  greater  the  worth  or  rank  of  the  life 
offered ,  the  more  effective  was  the  sacrifice .  ^  In  great  danger  the  ruler  or 
his  son  might  be  the  victim.  The  Carthaginians  thought  their  defeat, 
B.  c.  308,  due  to  Baal's  wrath  because  they  had  sacrificed  slaves  instead 
of  cliildren  of  noble  family  and  so  cast  into  the  furnace  one  hundred 
children,  and  three  hundred  more  offered  themselves.  The  efficacy  of 
royal  children  was  due  to  the  belief  that  deity  was  incarnate  in  the  king. 

Ascension  myths  have  many  forms.  A  hero  becomes  a  favourite 
of  the  gods,  and  therefore  they  take  him  to  themselves.  Leaders  may 
be  caught  up  in  ecstasy,  so  that  we  have  here  the  motive  of  eschatolog- 
ical  stories  of  voyages  of  pious  souls  after  death.  The  Hebrews  knew 
of  only  two  cases,  that  of  Enoch,  who  was  translated,  and  of  Elijah, 
who  went  up  in  a  fiery  chariot.  These  were  more  common  among  the 
Greeks  where  the  hero  may  be  taken  to  the  Elysian  fields  or  islands 
of  the  dead,  caves,  or  the  depths  of  the  sea,  or  Olympus.  Originally 
the  man  was  transferred,  body  and  soul,  without  death,  as  in  the  case 
of  Hercules  and  Romulus.  The  former  was  the  son  of  Zeus  and  a  hu- 
man mother,  and  so  continued  to  battle  with  fate  and  with  Hera,  but 


>S«e  here  Pileiderer:  "Early  ChriaUan  Concef)tioiu  of  Christ."    London,  1005,  170  p. 


JESUS'  ESCHATOLOGY  463 

overcame  death  in  this  and  in  the  lower  world,  conquering  Cerberus, 
delivering  Prometheus,  and  at  last  voluntarily  ascending  from  his 
funeral  pyre.  Many  mythic  heroes  of  heavenly  birth  return  heaven- 
ward. Caesar  was  raised  to  the  rank  of  a  god  by  oflScial  decree,  and 
the  soul  of  Augustus  after  his  death  was  seen  in  a  comet,  A  praetor 
swore  that  he  had  seen  the  emperor's  soul  fly  up  from  the  funeral  pyre 
to  heaven.  After  Peregrinus  had  thrown  himself  into  the  pyre  at 
Olympia,  a  man  declared  that  an  eagle  flew  up  from  the  flames  into 
heaven.  So,  too,  the  fact  of  the  apotheosis  of  ApoUonius  was  said 
to  be  proven  because  his  grave  could  nowhere  be  found  on  earth. 

So  the  apocalyptic  Jesus  is  exalted  as  Lord  of  Lords,  head  of 
the  Church  and  universe,  etc.  So  the  disciples  of  Buddha  hailed  him 
as  God  of  Gods,  Saviour,  Father,  joy,  light  of  the  world,  jewel  of  the  uni- 
verse. King  of  physicians,  hjoly,  before  whose  glory  sun,  moon,  and  fire 
shine  no  more,  the  miracle  of  three  thousand  worlds.  He  is  addressed 
as  "My  beloved,  my  riches,  greatness,  Ufe,"  as  omniscient,  as  yet 
accessible  to  prayer  although  he  has  entered  Nirvana,  because  he  is 
the  eternal  Spirit  of  salvation.  Marduk  of  Babyloa  was  also  adored 
as  king  of  kings,  finisher  of  creation,  and  such,  superlative  terms  have 
also  been  appUed  to  Ammon-Ra  in  Egypt,  Ahura-Mazda  in  Persia, 
etc.,  all  illustrating  the  same  need  of  the  soul  that  was  expressed  in  the 
apotheosis  of  the  historic  Jesus  who,  however,  alone  had  the  unique 
power  of  renewing  humanity.  Pfleiderer  says  that  the  chief  rival  of 
Jesus  in  early  centuries  was  not  Mithra,,  as  is  commonly  said,  but  the 
Roman  emperor.  Of  Augustus  it  is  said  that  all  things  would  have 
sunk  to  ruin  if  this  son  of  universal  joy  had  not  arisen  and  brought 
regeneration.  He  came  as  a  saviour.  "  In  his  appearance  the  hopes 
of  our  forefatherls  are  fulfilled.  He  has  not  only  surpassed  all  former 
benefactors  of  mankind,  but  it  is  even  impossible  that  a  greater  than  he 
should  ever  appear.  A  new  era  must  begin  from  his  birth."  Thus 
emperors  were  thought  incarnations  of  deity. 

But  the  point  here  is  that  the  Christian  idea  of  an  eternal  son  of 
God  who  became  man,  died,  descended  to  hell,  conquered  death  and 
Satan,  rose  from  the  dead,  ascended  to  heaven,  sits  at  the  right  hand 
of  God,  will  come  to  judge  the  quick  and  the  dead — all  these  articles 
are  found  in  religious  cults  of  the  East,  not  once  but  many  times. 
What  these  lack,  however,  is  a  single  subject  for  the  synthesis  of  all 
these  predicates,  a  nucleus  around  which  this  seething  mass  of  reUgious 


464  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

concepts  can  crystallize  into  a  new  world  of  hope  and  faith  for  the 
present  life  and  for  that  which  is  to  come.  It  was  precisely  this  that 
the  Pauline  risen  Jesus  gave.  Thus  the  best  in  the  old  heathen  myster- 
ies was  incorporated  into  Christianity,  so  that  in  it  members  of  these 
old  faiths  saw  each  their  own  cult  completed  and  glorified.  The  prog- 
ress of  the  primitive  Church  thus  did  not  consist  so  much  in  trans- 
planting the  religion  from  one  ethnic  soil  to  another,  nor  is  it 
adequately  described  as  cross-fertilization  of  religious  cults,  but  Paul  was 
enough  Jew,  Roman,  and  Greek  to  inaugurate  a  new  blending  of  strains. 
In  the  new  light  now  shed  on  Paul  he  stands  revealed  more  as  the 
apostle  of  than  to  the  gentiles.  His  movement  took  the  pagan  cults  of 
dying,  rising,  and  glorified  deities  and  heroes,  Semitized  and  synthetized 
and  in  general  edited,  and  took  them  back  in  a  sublimated  form  to  the 
people  about  the  Mediterranean  who  had  long  known  them  in  their 
own  cruder  and  more  imperfect  forms.  What  he  preached  to  them  was 
their  own  cult-categories  made  over  and  attached  to  a  Hebrew  hero 
whom  he  and  Peter  had  apotheosized  in  a  way  even  better  calculated 
to  meet  gentile  than  Hebrew  modes  of  thought  and  feeling.  This 
goes  far  toward  explaining  the  marvel  of  the  rapid  spread  of  early 
Christianity.  It  was  a  revival  of  the  old  ethnic  cults  which  were 
restored,  their  lacunae  filled  out,  their  themes  of  behef  and  rite  given 
new  names,  the  deeper  human  needs  they  had  met  embodied  in  a  new 
legend,  so  that  Mithra,  Osiris,  and  the  other  dying  and  rising  deities 
could  be  worshipped  again  and  in  unison  under  the  common  name  of 
the  risen  Christ.  Hence  the  great  power  ascribed  to  "his  name,"  for 
the  conversion  of  the  gentiles  was  largely  to  a  new  name,  the  only 
name  whereby  they  were  told  they  could  be  saved.  This  was  a  great 
achievement  of  the  Semitic  genius,  a  possibility,  which,  however,  as 
we  have  seen,  Jesus  anticipated  when  at  the  close  of  the  first  period  of 
his  career  he  turned  his  face  toward  death.  All  the  ingenuity  that  Paul 
and  most  Christian  writers  have  since  shown  in  tracing  the  origin  of 
the  dying-rising  concept  to  the  prophets  is  somewhat  misleading,  for 
no  fact  is  now  more  sun-clear  to  every  unprejudiced  student  who  can 
rightly  evaluate  culture  forces  than  that  this  was  distinctively  gentile. 
The  new  faith  did  not  destroy  but  fulfilled  the  preexisting  religions 
with  which  it  came  in  contact,  even  more  than  it  did  the  Old  Testa- 
ment. Psalms  and  prophets  could  be  retained,  much  of  the  rest  of 
the  old  canon  allegorized,  while  what  was  left  became  ineffective,  and 


JESUS'  ESCHATOLOGY  465 

under  the  influence  of  rabbinism  lapsed  and  desiccated  like  husk  from 
which  the  corn  had  been  taken.  These  heathen  cults  were  lapsing 
and  had  developed  fungoid  abominations  which  had  to  be  removed, 
but  the  stock  was  still  so  vital  that  with  discretion  new  grafts  could 
be  inserted  that  would  grow  and,  to  use  a  favourite  figure  of  Harnack's, 
serve  as  capillary  tubes  in  which  the  sap  of  the  new  religious  life  could 
rise  high,  quickly,  and  copiously.  On  the  whole  there  was  probably 
more  continuity  than  rupture  or  contrast,  so  that  the  new  faith  seemed 
to  be  the  natural  goal  of  the  evolution  of  old  ones.  Thus,  in  the  Chris- 
tian prayers,  meditation,  rites,  and  struggles  for  salvation,  the  best  of 
the  old  heathenism  still  lives.  The  view  which  underlay  all  its  forms 
was  that  atonement  comes  by  the  vicarious  sacrifice  of  the  god  of  the 
gens,  and  Paul's  self-immolating  Christ  is  no  mere  effigy  or  unwilling 
captive  or  criminal,  nor  an  intangible  phantom,  nor  a  metaphysical 
Platonic  idea,  but  a  symbol  of  the  human  race,  and  so  his  death  and 
Resurrection  are  not  so  much  an  historical  story  as  an  eternal  allegory. 
Wrede  even  suggests  that  had  Paul  had  personal  knowledge  of  Jesus 
this  would  have  been  something  of  an  obstacle  to  his  apotheosis  of  him, 
and  that  had  the  Pauline  epistles  come  first  in  the  New  Testament, 
as  they  were  first  in  time,  perhaps  we  could  hardly  have  regarded  Jesus 
as  a  real  man  but  rather  as  an  ideal  bearer  of  all  the  great  attributes 
or  a  composite  portrait  of  all  the  great  functions  with  which  previous 
rehgions  had  invested  their  supreme  ideals.  There  were  other  prefor- 
mations, e.  g.,  dreams  of  a  golden  age,  expectations  of  a  great  deliverer, 
deep  longing  for  post-mortem  personal  Hfe.  Some  or  most  of  these 
were  common  throughout  the  realm  conquered  by  Alexander  and  later 
by  Rome,  and  wherever  they  occurred  the  spread  of  Christianity  was 
facilitated,  while  where  they  were  unknown  or  dim  it  found  barriers 
hard  to  pass,  as,  e.  g.,  into  the  domain  of  Brahminism,  Confucianism, 
and  even  in  the  Teutonic  domain. 

Finally,  looking  back,  let  us  ask  ourselves  what  really  happened 
during  the  first  forty  days,  few  months,  or  very  first  few  years,  after 
Jesus'  death,  that  made  this  point  the  greatest  era  in  the  world's  history. 
We  can  answer  comprehensively  that  it  was  an  unprecedented  exalta- 
tion and  fusion  of  the  best  ideals  of  humanity.  The  phylon  "  took  up 
the  harp  of  Hfe  and  smote  on  all  the  chords  with  might;  smote  the  chord 
of  self,  which,  trembling,  passed  in  music  out  of  sight,"  so  that  the 
race  and  its  interests  came  nearer  than  ever  before  or  since  to  incar- 


466  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

nation  in  the  individual.  The  future  dominated  the  present,  and  inner 
states  were  so  intensified  that  outer  states  sank  to  relative  insignifi- 
cance and  moral  purity  became  a  passion.  This,  in  rough  terms,  was 
what  was  happening,  and  there  was  nothing  else  save  what  is  connoted 
and  denoted  in  these  phrases.  It  was  all  natural  and  all  expHcable 
by  the  unique  conjunction  of  events,  and  there  were  no  unknown  psy- 
chological laws.  It  was  the  sudden  advent  of  man's  adolescence 
with  its  characteristic  outburst  of  accelerated  growth,  its  penetrating 
insights,  foregleams  of  all  the  soul  will  ever  know,  its  realizations,  its 
waves  of  altruism  when  the  race  takes  possession  of  the  individual, 
endowing  him  with  all  his  rich  heritage  of  enthusiasm,  energy,  and 
intuition  which  it  is  henceforth  his  whole  duty  to  conserve,  refine,  and 
apply.  So  now  Gospels  had  soon  to  be  written,  and  myths,  miracles, 
epistles,  rites,  institutions,  grew,  born  of  the  effort  to  preserve,  object- 
ify, organize,  and  put  to  work  the  wealth  of  new  powers  so  lavishly 
poured  out.  The  new  psychic  energies  set  free  were  given  by  an  in- 
veterate instinct  a  Uranian  or  astral  direction.  A  filial  relation  was 
evolved  between  the  new  consciousness  and  the  source  of  all  things, 
personified  as  a  celestial  All-Father.  Closer  social  bonds  even  than 
those  of  classic  friendship  were  developed,  and  had  to  be  provided  for. 
Some  of  the  new  apergus  found  fit  embodiment  in  a  common  and  very 
portative  muthos  till  later,  born  of  the  needs  of  controversy  and  com- 
bined as  it  had  to  be  with  the  cumulative  wealth  of  religious  experi- 
ences, a  credo  arose  which  is  the  germ  of  theology.  Methods  of  attaining 
and  retaining  higher  inner  states  had  to  be  wrought  out,  as  did 
modes  of  demarcating  those  who  had  from  those  who  had  not  attained, 
or  who  opposed  it.  Access  to  this  higher  hfe  must  be  opened  to  all  men, 
etc.  The  prime  trait  of  early  Christianity  was  thus  a  great  tide  of  new 
joy  in  Hfe  that  lifted  everything  within  its  pale  to  a  higher  level.  New 
words,  even,  or  old  ones  charged  with  new  meanings  came  into  vogue— 
grace,  charity,  love,  hope,  faith,  the  Holy  Spirit  and  its  fruits,  repent- 
ance, forgiveness,  turning  from  death  to  Ufe,  putting  on  Christ  and  also 
having  him  born  within ;  for  new  experiences  had  to  have  new  phrases. 
But  it  was  impossible  to  objectify  or  realize  all  that  had  occurred 
and  been  dimly  sensed,  and  hence  all  who  had  experienced  the  great 
augmentation  of  efficiency  and  the  transformations  it  involved  believed 
that  beliind  and  above  all  they  knew  were  countless  higher  unseen  spir- 
itual agencies,  so  that  another  of  the  chief  characteristics  of  this  age 


JESUS'  ESCHATOLOGY  467 

was  its  intense  pneumaticism.^  This  meant  that  every  inner  calenture 
was  inspired  and  regarded  as  the  work  of  some  invisible  power  or  spirit, 
and  inspiration  was  possession.  Strong  and  inexplicable  impulses 
were  interpreted,  not  as  an  exaltation  of  the  natural  powers  of  man,  as 
we  know  them  to  be,  but  as  supernatural,  and  thus  divine  or  mysteries, 
gifts  of  the  Holy  Spirit  received  by  faith.  Weinel  says  that  what  might 
be  called  inspirational  seances  were  held  till  well  on  into  the  second 
century,  strange  as  they  seem  to  outsiders.  The  Holy  Ghost  was  com- 
municated to  neophytes  by  laying  on  of  hands,  and  prayer,  and  wrought 
signs  and  wonders.  The  apostolate  was  its  chief  gift,  and  it  might  be 
continuous,  as  with  its  members,  or  intermittent,  and  had  many  degrees. 
Instead  of  being  one  spirit,  it  was  often  conceived  as  differentiated  into 
many.  It  gave  visions,  wisdom,  sleep,  heroism.  Philo  said:  "When 
the  divine  insanity  or  prophetic  impulse  comes  over  man  the  sun  of 
consciousness  must  set  and  the  human  must  vanish  in  the  divine  light." 
Ecstasy  for  him  was  the  essential  form  of  prophecy;  but  every  wise  and 
virtuous  man  could  speak  not  his  own  mind,  but  utter  what  was  given 
to  him  as  will-lessly  as  the  strings  of  an  instrument.  Indeed,  for  dec- 
ades, most  great  thoughts  or  strong  feelings  that  came  suddenly  were 
thought  to  be  given  by  some  of  these  muses.  These  pneumatophores 
soon  had  to  distinguish  between  good  and  bad  spirits,  for  unclean 
demons  might  possess  the  soul.  The  Spirit  seized,  bound,  cried  out, 
drove  into  the  desert,  inspired  means  to  overthrow  Satan's  work;  and 
the  unpardonable  sin  was  to  mistake  the  work  of  a  true  spirit  for  that 
of  a  demon.  The  former  worked  miracles,  was  comparable  to  the  wind, 
its  visitations  were  like  those  of  angels,  made  of  fire  and  light.  In 
this  immaterial  world  dwell  the  souls  of  the  dead,  and  this  made  the 
whole  of  the  latter  part  of  the  first  and  second  centuries  eschatological. 
The  old  aeon  was  dead,  and  another  had  come.  Had  spiritism  been  too 
intensely  cultivated,  historicity  would  have  been  lost;  but  this  in  time 
was  duly  subordinated.  Paul's  anthropology  made  his  pneumaticism 
unique.  His  conversion,  his  claim  to  speak  with  tongues  more  than 
they  all,  his  tj^e  of  preaching,  his  calHng  as  an  extra  apostle,  his  groan- 
ing, sighing,  crying  "Abba,  Father,"  witnessed  to  his  possession  of  this 
heavenly  treasure.    It  welled  up  from  within,  bestowing  charismata 

»See  Weinel:  "Die  Wirkunjen  dei  Geistes  und  der  Geister  im  nachapostolischen  ZeiUlter,  bis  auf  Iren&us."  Leip- 
eig,  iSgg^  834  p.  H.  Gimkel:  "Die  Wirkungen  des  heiligen  Geistes."  ad  ed.  GSttingen  iSgg,  log  p.  Karl  Holl: 
"Enthusiasmus  und  Bussgewalt  beim  griechischen  Monchtum;  eine  Studie  ru  Syraeon  dem  neuen  Theologen."  1898, 
533  p.  Wendt:  "Teaching  of  Jesus."  igoi,»vol.  Harnack:  "Monasticism:  ita  Ideals  and  History,"  and  the  "Con- 
fessions of  St.  Augustine."    London,  igoi,  171  p. 


468  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

of  many  kinds  and  degrees.  Sometimes  it  interpreted  senseless  utter- 
ances. It  inspired  every  virtue.  Power  and  spirit  were  for  Paul 
synonymous.  It  was  God's  strength  and  will,  and  also  the  procreative 
power  of  the  heavenly  Father,  to  beget  earthly  children.  It  made  man 
not  only  a  new  being,  but  dead  to  the  world  with  which  he  must  make 
a  break.  Although  supernatural  and  sporadic,  it  had  its  own  laws,  and 
its  possession  marked  an  advance  over  the  prophets.  It  was  not  based 
on  speculation,  Hke  the  wisdom  Hterature  of  the  Hebrews,  but  was 
more  theosophic.  Paul's  life  w^as  a  riddle  to  him  which  he  sought  to 
explain  by  his  pneuma,  which  was  the  ideal  possession  of  eternal  hfe. 
For  him  there  was  at  least  partial  identity  between  it  and  Christ, 
although  the  efficiency  of  the  latter  was  greater.  One  of  its  attributes 
was  that  it  was  whole,  or  holy,  as  opposed  to  sin  or  disease,  and  its 
freedom  was  autonomous,  and  no  power  on  earth  could  constrain  it. 
His  experience  is  a  fresh  well-spring  of  the  inner  life,  and  its  psychological 
content  should  be  the  basis  of  theology,  which  like  reHgious  institu- 
tions, is  one  of  its  deposits.  These  newer  studies  of  religious  enthusi- 
asm made  the  attitude  toward  spirits,  in  Weinel's  phrase,  "the  most 
essential  possession  of  the  innermost  personal  Ufe  of  primitive  Chris- 
tendom." Here  we  must  include  apparitions,  demons,  angels,  for  the 
multifarious  spiritism  was  widespread  and  intense.  The  invisible 
world  of  powers,  principaHties,  heathen  gods,  was  long  a  dominant 
influence,  and  is  a  new  key  to  the  history  of  this  period.  Evil  spirits 
were  arrayed  under  the  leadership  of  Satan,  and  caused  countless  here- 
sies and  the  desolating  effects  of  the  persecutions  were  ascribed  to 
them.  They  manifested  themselves  in  hysterical,  epileptic  symptoms, 
heathen  magic,  spurious  miracles;  and  not  only  men,  but  even  animals, 
were  inspired  by  them  to  war  on  mankind.  Pagan  rites  were  sacrifices 
to  devils  whose  purpose  it  was  to  seduce  to  polytheism  and  idolatry, 
and  there  was  great  joy  when  one  Christian  was  led  astray.  Dread 
of  these  influences  became  a  superstitious  awe  that  darkened  Hfe  and 
gave  it  a  sombre  background.  War,  murder,  adultery,  sacrilege,  were 
inspirations  of  Satan  and  his  ministers.  He  sent  doubt,  pain,  hate, 
that  made  the  Christian  Hfe  a  desperate  battle  and  made  asceticism 
necessary.  These  mighty  invisible  personal  powers  behind  the  world 
were  weU  organized,  and  Olympian  Jove,  the  Roman  emperor,  and  all 
false  gods  were  their  representatives.  Christ,  on  the  other  hand,  in- 
spired faith  that  none  of  these  principalities  or  any  other  creature  could 


JESUS'  ESCHATOLOGY  469 

separate  the  believer  from  his  Master.  Thus,  good  and  evil  powers 
were  leagued  and  graded,  with  the  Holy  Spirit  supreme  among  the 
powers  of  good,  pouring  out  love  and  giving  assurance  that  the  legions 
of  Satan  would  be  driven  back  to  the  pit.  This  exuberance  of  enthusi- 
asm, which  was  interpreted  as  a  pouring  out  of  the  Spirit,  had  at  first 
to  be  checked  for  the  work  of  organization.  But  it  gave  the  inner 
witness;  transformed  life;  marked  the  beginning  of  life  in  heaven.  Its 
effects  were  not  only  speaking  in  unknown  tongues  which  were  often 
interpreted,  poetizing,  narrating  words  heard  in  trancoidal  states  or 
autosuggestions  that  came  in  meditation,  but  inspiring  authorship 
sometimes  without  comprehension,  by  direct  impartation.  Cures 
were  wrought;  demons  confessed  its  power.  In  the  field  of  will  it 
brought  both  tonic  and  clonic  cramps,  and  involuntary  and  sometimes 
uncoordinated  movements.  The  behest  of  the  Spirit  prompted 
symbolic  acts,  heroic  renunciation  of  possessions,  fasting,  continence, 
obedience,  service,  all  supernaturally  motivated.  Thus,  back  of  the 
phenomenal  world  were  two  camps  of  hostile  spirit  forces  arrayed 
against  each  other.  Virtue  was  the  work  of  the  one,  and  vice  that  of 
the  other.  Things  were  heard  without  understanding.  There  were 
floods  of  hght.  Some  had  clairvoyance  and  what  might  now  seem 
telepathy.  The  senses  were  affected,  and  in  apocalyptic  moments 
the  dramatic  state  brought  what  seemed  oblivion  to  the  outer  world. 
Never  has  there  been  such  richness  and  variety  of  pneumatic  life  as 
in  this  age,  which  Zeller  thinks  in  the  West  was  more  superstitious  than 
any  other  before  or  since.  All  this  showed  that,  for  generations,  the 
souls  of  men  were  in  a  state  of  high  tension;  and  the  marvel  is  that  these 
states  of  supercharged  mental  energy  often  went  with  the  greatest 
practical  sagacity. 

The  great  inaugural  work  of  the  Holy  Ghost  was  to  create  belief 
in  the  risen  Jesus;  but  more  than  this,  the  risen  Jesus  was  himself  its 
creation.  In  giving  realization  to  this  deep  unconscious  wish-suggestion 
in  the  soul  of  his  followers  it  not  only  worthily  inaugurated  but  virtually 
completed  its  work.  All  the  above  rank  growths  of  spiritism  that 
followed  were  involved  in  this  prime  act  of  faith  and  were  the  Vor- 
frucht  of  the  rich  virgin  soil  in  the  first  stages  of  reclamation  from  the 
miasmatic  marsh  of  superstition,  from  which  the  long  succession  of 
crops  of  idealisms  has  since  grown.  Now  the  pneuma  was  related  to 
the  psyche,  much  as  Platonism  thought  the  psyche  was  to  the  soma. 


47©  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

The  charismata  that  flowed  from  the  new  dispensation  of  the  Spirit 
which  was  the  pleroma  of  them  all  were  only  corollaries  of  full  belief 
in  the  Resurrection.  When  it  was  once  accepted,  all  the  rest  followed. 
This  gave  a  new  futuristic  trend,  for  the  centre  of  all  human  interests 
was  henceforth  less  on  what  was  or  is  than  on  what  was  about  to  be, 
and  the  wild  eschatology  of  that  day  was  only  a  rude  attempt  to  ex- 
press in  figurate  imagery  this  new  trend.  With  his  soul  really  back  in 
the  world,  identified,  believed  in,  and  marching  on,  as  captain  of  the 
souls  of  all  his  followers,  the  goal  of  all  Jesus'  endeavour  was  attained, 
his  work  was  finished,  his  legitimate  successor  installed,  and  he  and  his 
career  were  henceforth  only  a  memory,  sacred  and  enshrined.  Like 
other  great  leaders,  aU  that  was  human  of  him  sleeps  forever,  and  only 
his  spirit  henceforth  wakes  and  Hves.  It  does  so  only  in  those  souls 
that  experience  supernormal  reinforcement  or  are  inspired  by  the  larger 
soul  of  the  race,  impelling  them  to  new  and  upward  steps  in  the  evolu- 
tion of  an  ever-higher  manhood  in  an  ever-better  Jiingdom  of  man. 
What  Seelye  called  "the  enthusiasm  of  humanity,"  Giddings,  "the 
sense  of  kind,"  analysis  dubs  "ethical  erethism"  and,  in  general,  the 
higher  potentialization  in  the  individual,  and  in  communities,  of  the 
power  that  makes  for  righteousness,  that  toward  the  future  gives  aug- 
mented optimism  for  the  good  and  a  deeper  pessimism  for  the  bad, 
reinforced  now  by  new  eugenic  insights — these  together  constitute 
the  legacy  of  Jesus  and  indicate  the  most  generic  gifts  of  the  Spirit. 
Such  phrases  indicate  the  rough  shadow  plan  of  the  higher  story  which 
Jesus  built  in  the  mansion  of  Mansoul.^ 


•See  A.  Schweitzer:  "Paul  and  His  Interpreters."  London,  igu,  j6S  p.  O.  Pfleiderer:  "Lectures  on  the  Influence 
of  the  Apostle  Paul  on  the  Development  of  Christianity."  Trans,  by  J.  F.  Smith.  3d  ed.,.London,  1897,  39J  p.  For  a 
handy  but  uncritical  sketch,  see  E.  D.  Wood:  "The  Life  and  Ministry  of  Paul  the  Apostle."  Boston,  191a,  a6i  p.  See 
also  f.  C.  Geikie:  "The  Gospels."  London,  1894,  sao  p.;  A.  C.  McGiffert:  "A  History  of  Christianity  in  the  Apostolic 
Age.''  New  York,  1903,  68i  p.;  H.  B.  Carr6:  "Paul's  Doctrine  of  Redemption."  New  York,  1914,  17s  P-:  James  Orr: 
Problem  of  the  Old  Testament."    New  York,  1906,  56a  p.;  H.  B.  Swete:  "Appearances  of  Our  Lord  after  the  Passion." 


;  bibliography 
oiivj  vKuoiuvu.  i.<.-T  iv^io.,  .y-^.  3^'  ft  "•  Hanna:  'TL>.  »>».vj  ..^-^.^  .....w.  «—  »».»..  ..^.,-..^^v.„«.  • — ,  — ^  ,-. 
See  also  Segaloff :  "  Die  biologische  Bedeutung  der  F.kstase,  Zeits.  f .  Psychotherapie  u.  medizinische  Psychologic.  '  See 
also  my  "Human  Efficiency,"  address  at  Clark  College,  1909;  G.  E.  Partridge:  "Psychology  of  Second  Breath,"  Fed. 
Sent.,  Vol.  4,  No.  3;  also  his  "Psychology  of  Intemperance";  G.  T.  Patrick:  "Psychology  of  Relaxation";  Mantegazza: 
"Die  Ekstasen  des  Menschen";  F.  M.  Davenjxjrt:  "Primitive  Traits  in  Religious  Revivals";  A.  Lang:  "Myth,  Ritual 
and  Religion";  W.  James:  "Varieties  of  Religious  Experience";  Bourke:  "Snake  Dance  of  the  Moquis";  Bauman, 
Hauptmann,  H.  A.  Kennedy:  "St.  Paul's  Conception  of  the  Last  Thinp<!."  1904.  390  p.;  L.  A.  Muirhead:  "The 
Eschatology  of  Jesus."  1904,  324  p.;  G.  B.  Stevens:  "The  Pauline  Theology."  1908,  383  p.;  W.  D.  Hyde: 
"From  Epicurus  to  Christ."     1905,  jSs  p. 

I  have  been  also  indebted  to  J.  H.  Holtzmann:  "Das  messianische  Bewitsstsein  Jesu."  Tubingen,  1907,  100  p.; 
A.  Pott:  "Das  Hoflen  im  Neuen  Testament."  Leipzig,  1915,  ao^  p.;  D.  E.  Haupt:  "Die  eschatologischen  Aussagen 
Jesu  in  den  synoptischen  Evangelien."  Berlin,  189;.  167  p.;  A.  Kalthoff:  "Die  Entstehung  des  Christentums."  Leip- 
cii,  1004,  iss  p.;  M.  BrUckner:  "Die  Enstehung  der  paulinischen  Christologie."  Strassburg.  1903,  ai7  P.;  T).  B. 
Weiss:  "Die  Religion  des  Neuen  Testaments."  Stuttgart,  1903,  331  p.;  G.  H.  MacNish:  "The  Master  of  Evolution." 
Boston,  iQii,  13s  p.;  C.  A.  Briggs:  "The  Messiah  of  the  Gospels."  New  York,  1894,  337  p.;  A.  P.  Stokes:  "What  Jesus 
Christ  Thought  of  Himself."  New  York,  1916,  114  p.;  C.  A.  Dinsmore:  "Atonement  in  Literature  and  Life."  1906,  aso 
p.;  C.  F.  Kent:  "The  Work  and  Teaching  of  the  Apostles."  1015,  313  p.;  G.  H.  Gilbert:  "The  First  Interpreters  of 
Jeaus."  igoi,  739  p.;  O.  Pfleiderer:  "Primitive  Christianity.'"  f  vols,  igii;  W.  H.  Thurton:  "The  Truth  of  tha 
Goapels."     1913,  639  p.;  F.  Andres:  "Die  En8ellehre."ioi4,  183  p.;  G.  Denny:  "Je«u«  and  the  Gospels."     1908,  418  p. 


CHAPTER  EIGHT 

JESUS'  ETHICS  AND  PRAYER 

I.  Gist  of  the  moral  teachings  of  the  sermon  on  the  mount — 
Subordination  of  the  individual  to  the  whole  among  unicellular  or- 
ganisms, also  the  bee  and  the  ant — ^Animal  herds — Primitive  totemic 
society — Altruism  and  mutual  help — The  ethics  of  self -subordination — 
Interpretations  of  totemism,  its  influence  in  shaping  the  doctrines  and 
life  of  early  Christendom — The  contrast  between  the  hyperindividual 
or  superman  and  the  opposite  of  social  subordination  and  effacement — 
Jesus'  attitude  to  science  and  its  explanation — II.  The  evolution  of 
prayer  among  primitive  people — Its  types,  forms,  and  meanings  —Its 
place  in  the  world  of  science — Its  incalculable  psychological  and  peda- 
gogical influence — Its  specific  functions,  especiaUy  that  of  confession 
in  the  new  light  which  psychology  has  shed  upon  it — An  exposition  of 
the  Lord's  Prayer  in  the  Hght  of  modern  thought. 

THE  so-called  sermon  on  the  mount  embodies  the  most  essential 
teachings  of  Jesus.  The  first  and  strongest  impression  it  makes 
upon  every  candid  mind  is  that  it  challenges  in  the  most 
flagrant  way  most  of  the  principles  on  which  modern  Occidental 
man  conducts  his  life.  The  beatitudes  are  upon  the  poor  in  spirit, 
the  meek,  the  mourners,  those  who  are  persecuted  and  reviled.  They 
are  to  inherit  heaven  and  earth  along  with  the  pure  in  heart,  those  who 
hunger  for  righteousness,  the  merciful,  and  the  peacemakers.  These 
are  the  salt  and  light  of  the  world. 

Then  come  the  great  inwardizations.  To  feel  anger  is  murder; 
to  feel  lust,  adultery.  If  any  member  or  function  offend,  get  rid  of  it, 
even  if  that  involve  mutilation.  Sacrifice  is  giving  up  rancour.  Simple 
assent  and  dissent  are  sufficient,  with  no  oaths  or  protestations.  Hard- 
est of  all  is  the  precept,  "resist  not  evil;  turn  the  other  cheek  to  the 
smiter;  if  you  are  robbed,  give  the  robber  more;  love  your  enemies; 
bless  them  that  curse  you;  do  good  to  them  that  hate  and  persecute 
you."  Give  alms,  pray  and  fast,  not  in  public  but  secretly.  Seek  no 
other  but  heavenly  treasure;  serve  God  wholly;  take  no  more  thought 

471 


472  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

concerning  food  than  do  the  birds,  or  concerning  clothes  than  do  the 
lilies;  think  not  of  the  morrow.  Ask  and  you  will  receive  all  that  is 
good  for  you.  Pronounce  no  judgments  upon  others.  Do  to  others 
as  you  wish  them  to  do  to  you.  Those  who  practise  these  precepts 
build  not  upon  the  shifting  sands  but  upon  the  Rock  of  Ages. 

Surely,  even  to  attempt  seriously  to  live  according  to  such  pre- 
scriptions, one  must  become  an  ascetic  or  a  monk  and  devote  his  whole 
life  to  self-regimentation.  In  a  world  of  such  individuals  there  would 
be  little  industrial  wealth,  ambition,  enterprise,  feasting,  amusement, 
fashion,  rivalry,  or  competition.  There  would  be  no  wars,  or  even 
conflicts,  no  personal  foresight,  no  penalties,  no  pride  of  station,  and 
no  knowledge  or  lust  of  power.  Evil  would  remain  unresisted,  and 
there  would  be  no  toil  or  worry  for  a  livelihood.  Even  Oriental  com- 
munities that  have  taken  these  precepts  in  earnest  and  tried  to  Hve 
up  to  them  have  almost  always  come  to  grief.  No  wonder  that  such 
ideals  have  been  sometimes  derided  as  a  fool's  paradise  by  enemies, 
on  the  one  hand,  or  on  the  other  have  been  characterized  in  every 
kind  of  mitigating,  accommodating,  and  euphemistic  way  by  friends. 
Still,  if  we  are  honest,  we  cannot  escape  the  bald  fact  that  it  is  exactly 
in  these  precepts  that  we  have  the  core  of  Jesus'  teaching,  and  that  he 
meant  them  to  be  taken  literally.  Moreover,  the  more  we  study  the 
above  items,  the  more  we  realize  that  they  are  not  isolated,  so  that  we 
can  pick  and  choose,  accepting  some  and  rejecting  others;  but  they 
form  a  pretty  complete  psychological  and  ethical  whole,  so  that  if  we 
abate  the  rigour  of  one,  that  of  the  others  suffers.  The  injunction  to 
resist  not  evil,  e.  g.,  was  the  only  thing  in  the  sermon  on  the  mount 
which  Wu  Ting  Fang  seriously  challenged,  but  Tolstoi  made  it  the 
key  to  everything  in  Christianity. 

Are  these  ideals  good,  true,  or  even  beautiful?  Are  they  practical? 
The  best  point  of  view  from  which  to  answer  these  questions  we  shall 
find  by  a  glance  at  the  early  evolutionary  stages  of  social  development. 

Once  unicellular  organisms  were  the  highest  forms  of  Hfe.  Each 
individual  performed  all  the  fundamental  vital  functions  of  self- 
preservation,  food-getting,  and  reproduction.  When  multicellular 
organisms  arose,  each  cell  surrendered  progressively  some  of  its  func- 
tions, and  developed  and  specialized  others  in  the  interests  of  the  whole 
and  with  great  gain.  The  higher  organisms  thus  evolved  proved  to 
have  many  advantages  in  the  struggle  for  existence.    The  integration 


JESUS'  ETHICS  AND  PRAYER  473 

and  differentiation  of  the  constituent  units  which  thus  occurred  in- 
volved more  or  less  limitation  and  subordination  of  each  part  to  the 
whole.  Even  where  colonies  of  protozoa  arose,  the  same  advance 
occurred  in  greater  or  less  degree  as  Espinas  was  the  first  to  show  in  a 
broad  way.  Indeed,  every  metazoan  body  is  a  colony  of  cells.  A 
swarm  of  bees  or  a  nest  of  ants  might  be  called  a  body  in  which  each 
unit  while  acting  within  the  plan  of  the  whole,  is  detached  enough  to 
have  its  own  freedom  of  movement.  The  worker  bee^  often  works 
itself  to  death  in  two  or  three  months  for  the  sake  of  the  hive.  In 
the  ant  state  the  individual  is  no  less  subordinated  to  the  welfare  of  the 
community.  Each  class  and  each  individual  has  its  own  functions  in 
conserving  and  developing  the  community,  which  lives  on  for  genera- 
tions with  a  kind  of  terrestrial  immortality,  while  countless  generations 
of  individuals  wear  themselves  out  in  serving  it.  Thus  to  each  cell  in 
a  body,  and  to  each  member  of  such  an  insect  community,  the  precepts 
of  Jesus  concerning  abandonment  of  personal  ends  for  the  good  of  the 
whole  would  hold;  for  each  individual  is  only  a  means  to  an  end  vaster 
than  itself. 

In  the  social  organization  of  higher  forms  of  animal  life  gregarious- 
ness  has  inmiense  advantages  over  solitary  habits,  as  we  see  in  the 
familiar  comparisons  between  the  cat  and  the  dog,  which  are  vastly 
to  the  advantage  of  the  latter  because  it  is  far  more  completely  domesti- 
cated, more  intelligent,  docile,  etc.  Man  is  probably  the  most  gre- 
garious of  all  mammals,  and  to  this  fact  he  owes,  in  no  small  part, 
not  only  his  survival  but  his  dominion  over  the  animal  world.  Thus 
his  social  nature  means  that  even  his  primary  egoistic  impulsions 
for  food  and  sex,  and  also  his  fear,  anger,  lust  for  power  and  possessions, 
etc.,  are  constantly  restrained  in  the  interests  of  the  clan,  tribe,  or 
group  to  which  he  belongs,  which  always  demands  altruism.  The  re- 
pressions thus  arising  from  his  social  milieu  have  operated  from  the  very 
first,  and  probably  even  before  he  became  man,  and  their  influence  is 
powerful.  They  are  also  all-pervading  and  their  ramifications  are  met 
in  every  department  of  life.  The  herd  instinct  is  far  more  dominant 
than  one  would  infer  from  the  psychology  of  crowds,  or  even  that  of 
suggestion.  It  may  be  mainly  offensive  as  is  illustrated  by  the  wolf- 
pack,  or  chiefly  defensive,  as  in  a  flock  of  sheep.    Group  influences 


»See  Maeterlinck:  "The  Life  of  the  Bee";  also  especially  W.  Trotter:  "The  Instinct  of  the  Herd  in  Peace  and  War." 
igis.  aia  p. 


474  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

incessantly  check,  facilitate,  transform,  man's  every  impulse.  They 
make  society,  from  the  clan  up,  more  or  less  homogeneous.  It  is  due  to 
them  that  each  unit  is  so  extremely  sensitive  to  the  conduct  and  senti- 
ment of  each  other  member  of  his  group,  as  well  as  of  the  whole,  as  we 
see  all  the  way  from  the  first  symbiosis  up  to  the  development  of  the 
higher  form  of  sympathy.  To  break  from  group  control,  custom,  ac- 
tion, or  opinion,  involves  a  painful  conflict.  Suggestion  and  even 
speech  itself  are  media  of  the  union  of  each  with  all.  Much  that  we 
call  reason  is  only  an  attempt  to  justify  our  instinctive  acquiescence 
in  the  mandates  of  society;  and  a  large  part  of  human  conduct,  and 
most  of  what  we  call  morals,  and  even  religion,  consists  essentially  of 
group  prescriptions,  so  that  about  all  sin  is  defiance  of  social  control, 
and  insistence  upon  our  personal  uninhibited  individual  wishes  and 
desires.  Whenever  we  do  thus  break  away  from  what  the  general 
consensus  of  our  social  milieu  requires  we  have  a  painful  sense  of  un- 
worthiness,  ill-desert,  imperfection,  insufiiciency;  in  a  word,  of  sin  or 
guilt.  The  Pauline  war  within  our  members  began  with  the  very  first 
inclination  to  violate  tribal  taboo. 

As  human  society  has  grown  complex,  and  family,  clan,  community, 
and  man's  social  rapport  have  irradiated,  and  have  also  broken  up 
into  industrial,  cultural,  and  other  groups  within  groups,  the  adjust- 
ment between  egocentric  incHnations  and  social  requirements  has 
become  very  complex  and  very  difficult.  Conflicts  are  innumerable. 
They  are  incessant  and  painful,  and  men  often  break  away  from  the 
law  of  service  to  the  whole.  Thus,  man  is  not  so  adjusted  to  his  human 
as  the  bee  is  to  its  community.  That  he  should  become  no  less  so  is  the 
postulate  of  Jesus.  Only  when  this  adjustment  is  made  will  man  be 
an  ideal  socius  in  an  ideal  kingdom.  To  effect  a  complete  adaptation 
between  them  both,  society  and  the  individual  must  change.  But  the 
change  can  and  must  begin  with  the  individual.  The  bee  and  ant 
state  began  to  evolve  countless  ages  before  man  appeared,  so  that 
besides  being  simpler  themselves  and  Hving  in  a  simpler  state,  they 
have  had  a  vastly  longer  time  to  develop  their  communities.  Both 
the  human  individual  and  his  society  are  vastly  more  complex.  More- 
over, man  has  been  very  seriously  aberrant  and  has  suffered  loss  or 
arrest.  Storms  of  passion  and  many  departures  from  his  norm  have 
left  their  scars  upon  his  nature.  It  may  well  be  doubted,  too,  whether 
modern  institutions  control  the  individuals  within  them  to-day  as 


JESUS'  ETHICS  AND  PRAYER  475 

completely  as  was  the  case  in  the  ancient  tribe.  From  the  point  of 
view  of  the  sermon  on  the  mount,  man  seems  to  have  just  begun  to 
effectively  socialize  himself,  old  as  are  his  efforts  and  deep  as  is  his  in- 
stinct to  do  so.  In  some  respects  conventions  are  too  rigid,  and  pre- 
vent what  Walt  Whitman  and  Carpenter  call  "free  exfoliation"  of 
the  individual  without  danger  of  disruption  of  the  social  bond,  and 
thus,  too,  great  resistance  to  progress  and  free  differentiation  arises. 
Here  social  pressure  is  too  great,  there  too  weak,  or  man  is  too  insensi- 
tive to  it.  Jesus  had  little  place  for  great  men  or  hero-worship  in  the 
Kingdom  as  he  conceived  it.  But  his  blessings  are  upon  the  simple 
life,  and  his  praises  are  for  simple  duties  in  a  simple  environment. 
History  is  essentially  the  story  of  man's  efforts  to  find  his  place  in 
nature,  and  especially  his  true  relations  to  his  fellow  men;  and  both 
endeavours,  especially  the  latter,  are  now  in  their  rudimentary  stages. 
When  this  work  is  finished,  we  may  perhaps  then  reahze  the  ethics  of 
Jesus,  and  the  hyperindividuation  of  to-day  may  be  reduced  to  the 
dimensions  most  favourable  for  the  interests  of  the  race,  to  serve  which 
is  the  whole  of  both  duty  and  piety. 

Not  only  Jesus'  person  as  Messiah,  the  atonement  achieved  by  his 
death,  his  mystic  union  with  the  Father  and  his  followers,  according 
to  Pauline  and  Johannin  doctrines  (as  characterized  in  other  chapters 
of  this  book),  but  the  ethics  of  self-subordination  taught  in  his  "Ser- 
mon" are  all  standing  forth  in  a  new  Hght  by  reason  of  the  manifold 
studies  of  what  it  is  now  apparent  was  the  chief  culture  system  of  un- 
counted prehistoric  millennia,  to  which  we  give  the  inadequate  name  of 
totemism.  Robertson  Smith  first  showed  how  totemism  was  the  key 
to  the  secrets  of  the  entire  sacrificial  cult  of  the  Old  Testament.  Other 
studies  show  how  it  permeated  the  cults  of  ancient  Egypt,  Assyria, 
Persia,  Greece,  Phoenicia,  Mexico,  and  Peru,  to  say  nothing  of  the 
entire  social  organism  of  many  primitive  peoples.  When  we  ask  what 
it  was,  and  especially  how  it  arose,  expert  opinions  are  hopelessly 
divergent.  [^ 

Frazer,  after  long  and  perplexing  investigations,  thought  he  had 
found  a  solution  among  the  Arunta.^  Mothers  at  first  did  not  know, 
and  later  feigned  ignorance  of,  the  cause  of  conception.  When  a 
mother  felt  the  first  movements  of  a  child  in  her  body  attention  may 


i"Totemism  and  Esogamy."    Edinburgh,  1887.    Especially  p.  gS.    See  also  "The  Beginnings  of  Religion  and 
Totemism  Among  the  Australian  Aborigines,"  Forinightly  Review,  Sept.,  1905. 


476  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

have  been  strongly  drawn  to  something  near  her,  for  instance,  an  emu 
or  a  kangaroo,  which  acquired  thus  a  peculiar  significance,  till  she 
fancied  its  soul  had  "struck  root  in  her."  Thus  the  child,  when  born, 
although  it  will  look  human  will  be  an  emu  or  a  kangaroo  in  essence. 
The  child,  when  later  told  of  this  paternity,  loved  and  cultivated  the 
species.  Thus  many  other  totems  would  be  found  by  others.  In  this 
"conception  theory"  Frazer  said,  "our  plummet  has  at  last  touched 
bottom,"  although  he  has  later  abandoned  this  view  in  despair. 
Totemism  often,  as  here,  included  the  idea  of  ancestral  spirits,  perhaps 
connected  with  amulets  archaically  marked,  and  so  discarnate  spirits  of 
older  days  may  be  reborn.  On  the  other  hand,  of  201  totems  in 
Central  AustraHa,  169  are  of  edible  animals.  Ten  years  later  F.  Max 
Miiller^  sought  to  discredit  totemism  by  calling  it  an  infantile  epidemic 
of  thought,  refusing  to  credit  the  totemic  origin  even  of  Eg3T)tian  thier- 
olatry,  totemism  being  inconsistent  with  his  theory  of  a  more  primitive 
and  direct  worship  of  natural  objects,  and  holding  that  animals  and 
other  fetishes  of  savages  were  eponymous  ancestors. 

W.  Robertson  Smith^'  reduces  the  most  essential  part  of  the  Old 
Testament  cult  of  Yahveh  to  totemism,  which  was  also  the  core  of  the 
ceremony  of  the  feast  of  the  dead.  An  offering  on  an  altar  or  a  sacri- 
ficium  was  the  essential  rite  in  about  all  religions,  and  was  "  an  act  of 
social  fellowship  between  the  deity  and  his  worshippers,"  or  a  com- 
munion of  the  faithful  with  their  god.  The  oldest  offerings  were  ani- 
mals, and  others  came  later  and  were  progressively  dematerialized — 
flesh,  blood,  then  smoke  or  incense.  The  significance  of  common  eating 
was  always  to  strengthen  the  social  bond;  for  the  god  was  commensal 
with  his  worshippers,  and  eating  the  same  food  meant  the  same  material 
of  their  body.  In  this  act  the  worshipper  says  to  his  god,  "  You  are  my 
blood  and  flesh. ' '  As  men  are  consubstantial  with  their  mother  through 
her  milk,  so  food  is  a  family  bond.  There  was  no  communion  without 
the  sacrifice  of  an  animal,  and  this  must  always  be  pubHc;  for  no  one 
could  slay  even  a  domestic  animal  for  his  own  use.  The  common  blood 
of  the  tribe  is  sacred,  and  the  sacrificial  animal  was  treated  like  a 
relative,  so  that  the  god,  the  animal,  and  the  tribe  were  one,  not  unlike 
the  persons  of  the  Trinity.  Thus  the  animal  offered  up  became  a 
totem.    The  sacrificial  animal  was  holy  to  the  god,  and  originally 


«"  Contributions  to  the  Science  of  Mythology."    London,  1897.    Especially  pp.  7, 158,  and  443- 

>"The  Religion  of  the  Semites."    New  York,  1889,  488  p. 


JESUS'  ETHICS  AND  PRAYER  477 

identical  with  the  god.  All  animals  were  once  sacred,  and  no  flesh 
could  be  eaten  unless  the  whole  tribe  participated  in  so  doing,  for  to 
slaughter  an  animal  was  to  pour  out  tribal  blood.  On  this  basis  de- 
veloped in  many  lands  the  idea  that  atonement  was  necessary  for  the 
slaughterer  in  this  sacrifice,  which  was  the  tie  that  binds  the  members 
of  the  race  each  to  each,  and  each  to  his  god,  and  each  to  the  totemic 
animal,  the  Hfe  of  which  must  not  be  touched  unless  the  entire  tribe 
was  guilty.  Thus  the  totem  animal  was  the  primitive  god,  slaying 
and  eating  of  which  brought  the  closest  communion.  The  Aztec 
human  offerings,  the  bear  offerings  of  the  bear  tribe,  also  the  lanos, 
the  tortoise  offerings  among  the  Zunis,  illustrate  this  "killing  the  divine 
animal  and  eating  the  god." 

Durkheim^  regards  the  totem  as  almost  a  god,  dwelling  in  each 
member  of  the  group  and  all  of  them  in  it.  It  is  not  only  the  con- 
dition of  the  existence  of  the  group,  but  soul  of  its  soul  and  life  of  its 
Ufe.  It  is  also  the  clan  ancestor  immanent  in  it,  and  incarnate  in 
each  individual,  perhaps  his  very  blood  itself.  It  is  the  chief  object 
of  the  cult  of  a  tribe,  and  the  focus  of  its  religion.  Each  totem,  there- 
fore, is  in  a  sense  divine,  and  if  its  blood  is  shed  its  very  being  is  poured 
out.  Thus  the  totem  is  consanguineous  and  consubstantial  in  each 
in  whom  it  dwells,  and  is  the  central  part  of  his  personahty.  It  can 
no  more  be  changed  than  can  his  soul.  It  is  a  principle  of  filiation. 
So  intussuscepted  are  the  members  of  a  totem  tribe  or  phratry  that  it 
becomes  incestuous  for  them  to  marry;  hence,  exogamy.  Animals  of 
the  same  species  as  the  totem  are  usually  tabooed,  for  to  eat  them 
would  be  cannibalism.  If  half  of  a  horde  chose  a  separate  animal 
deity,  the  horde  would  then  split  into  two  clans  which  might  become 
hostile,  but  members  of  the  one  clan  can  now  intermarry  with  those  of 
the  other  by  capture  or  purchase.  Back  of  this  strange  biological  meta- 
physics of  totemism  Durkheim  assumes  an  aboriginal  religiosity  or  a 
feeling  of  something  potent,  dreadful,  supernal  (as  Mana  principle), 
which  in  process  of  time  became  attached  more  to  certain  animals  or 
persons  than  to  others,  perhaps  originally  more  often  to  women, 
whose  motherhood  is  mystically  regarded.  This  divine  principle, 
therefore,  was  a  diffusive  power  that  came  to  concentrate  itself  in  the 
emu,  bear,  etc.,  which  then  became  a  sacred  shrine  of  the  divinity  and 
gave  the  name  of  the  animal  to  the  tribe.    He  assumes  that  the  sexual 

>Variou3  articles  in  L'AitnU  Sociolcgiqut  since  1898. 


478  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

relation  was  first  more  or  less  promiscuous,  and  that  thus  arose  the 
first  attempts  to  regulate  it.  The  totemic  animal  is  neither  exactly 
the  species  nor  the  Platonic  idea  of  it.  It  is  an  individual  but  mythical 
being  from  whom  all  members  of  the  group  evolved,  so  that  once 
within  it  existed  potentially  both  the  human  clan  and  the  animal 
species,  both  being  thus  close  blood  relations.  Totemism  is  thus 
usually  closely  connected  with  the  segregation  of  tribes  into  primitive 
matrimonial  classes.  Durkheim  does  not  attempt  to  suggest  the  time 
which  it  took  totemism  to  evolve,  but  J.  F.  Hewitt^  in  discussing  the 
development  of  the  mythology  of  India,  which  he  thinks  was  made  by 
projecting  more  or  less  important  events  rather  than  individuals  in 
very  highly  symbolic  form  upon  the  heavens,  wherein  if  we  only  had 
the  cipher  we  could  read  in  the  ancient  astrological  creatures  there  the 
history  of  man,  believes  we  must  go  back  definitely  to  about  21,000 
years  b.  c.  and  that  this  period  continued  down  to,  and  indeed  well 
into,  the  historic  period.  As  perpetuated  guide-marks  of  the  progress 
of  tribes,  with  events  apotheosized  in  the  very  names  of  the  constella- 
tions (at  first  animal),  these  official  transmitters  gave  us  in  pictorial 
language  the  story  of  their  achievements  laid  off  in  superposed  layers, 
which  added  greatly  to  man's  interest  in  the  heavens  and  still  rever- 
berates with  the  momentum  of  millennia  in  the  soul.  Thus  heavenly 
things  acquired  a  new  interest  till  they  were  superseded  by  a  later  race 
that  took  a  more  economic  view  of  stellar  phenomena.  Many  believe 
that,  at  least  in  these  fields,  we  have  sketchy  outlines  or  remnants  of 
the  history  of  man  long  before  there  is  any  other  record,  that  here  Hes 
the  philosophy  of  the  paleo-  and  neo-lithic  ages  before  domestication 
of  animals,  and  that  we  glimpse  here  old  methods  of  thought  labori- 
ously wrought  out  which  already  gave  man  mental  unity  and  a  basis 
of  association,  brought  economy  in  thinking,  together  with  communal 
soHdarity,  and,  especially,  laid  the  foundations  for  religion. 

Lang'  takes  a  very  different  view.  Agreeing  with  Darwin  that 
primitive  man  must  have  lived  in  very  small  and  highly  gregarious 
communal  groups,  so  small,  indeed,  that  male  jealousy  on  the  part  of 
the  head  of  the  clan  would  be  a  constant  repellant  force  (especially 
since  man  is  amatory  at  all  seasons),  he  thinks  that  these  early  groups 
of  men  came  to  assume  the  names  of  certain  animals  and  other  objects 

>" History  and  ChronoloRy  of  the  Myth-Making  Age."    London,  igox.    Also  "The  Ruling  Races  of  Prehistoric 
Times  in  India,"  etc.    London,  1894. 

>"Tbe  Secret  of  the  Totem."    London,  1905,  9x5  pi 


JESUS'  ETHICS  AND  PRAYER  479 

and  thus  to  feel  themselves  in  closer  rapport  with  them,  and  to  develop 
a  general  magic  for  the  species  thus  constituted  of  which  they  were  a 
part.  Hewitt  had  thought  that  the  animal  name  began  the  entire 
process,  and  would  be  thought  to  imply  a  mystic  connection.  The 
name  was  thus  the  soul-bearer  or  box.  Hence,  the  totem  became  the 
group-soul  designating  the  most  vital  part,  and  all  individuals  bearing 
that  name  were  psychically  one.  Pikler  and  Somlo^  thought  that  one 
of  the  first  needs  of  man  was  settled  names  for  his  communities,  which 
could  be  expressed  in  pictographs,  tattoos,  on  grave-posts,  etc.,  as  a 
clan  mark,  and  the  advantage  of  animal  names  was  that  they  could  be 
better  expressed  in  picture  language.  On  this  view,  therefore,  the 
name  is  the  germ  of  totemism.  Once  the  relation  between  all  objects 
and  their  names  was  everywhere  deemed  vital.  On  this  view  totemism 
took  its  rise  rather  in  the  practical  needs  of  man  than  in  his  religious 
instincts.  To  utter  names,  or  even  to  know  them,  gave  enemies  or 
lovers  power  over  those  who  bore  them.  Hence,  true  names  were 
often  secret,  and  perhaps  in  proportion  as  the  generic  name  became 
recognized  and  accepted  by  those  bearing  it,  it  could  be  used  to  harm 
or  help  an  entire  group.  Later,  when  the  connection  between  the 
totem  name  and  what  it  designated  was  settled,  man's  active  specula- 
tive mind  began  to  evolve  myths  as  to  the  connection  between  itself 
and  its  name-giving  totem,  and  this  solidarity  often  became  quite  as 
great  as  that  between  mother  and  child.  The  bond  of  union  was 
blood.  Later,  but  on  this  basis,  came  the  various  taboos  pertaining  to 
the  particular  animal,  and  also  to  marriage.  Sometimes  even  contact 
with  the  totem  means  disrespect  for  its  palladial  quality.  Savages 
never  know  the  origin  of  these  transcendentally  binding  names,  be- 
cause it  is  always  obscured  by  traditions  of  later  origin.  Lang  thinks 
they  may  have  arisen  as  sobriquets  or  nicknames  given  by  one  group 
to  another,  sometimes  perhaps  opprobrious  at  first,  even  though  later 
adopted.  Thus,  to  receive  the  name  of  an  animal  in  the  savage  mind 
came  to  mean  "to  be  endowed  with  the  essence  or  spirit  of  the  object 
or  to  be  under  its  protection,  to  become  one  with  it  in  a  very  special 
and  unique  sense."  The  epithet  may  have  been  suggested  by  some 
resemblance  of  feature  or  trait,  although  Hewitt  thinks  that  dreams 
of  seers  or  medicine  men  may  have  given  a  sense  of  relationship  to  some 
specific  animal.    The  totem  name  became  the  centre  of  a  reUgious 

>"Der  Urspnms  des  Totemismui."    Berlin,  igoo,  36  p. 


48o  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

system  involving  praying  to,  feeding,  or  burying  the  totem,  best  seen  in 
Samoa  where  the  totem  was  regarded  as  the  shrine  of  an  ancestral 
spirit.  In  Egypt  the  animal  gods  were  once  totems,  and  some  of  them 
were  even  creators.  Menzies^  says  roundly,  "  there  is  no  animal  that 
has  not  once  been  worshipped,"  and  he  thinks  that  in  Babylonia  we  have 
the  earhest  clear  records  of  the  transition  from  zoolatry  to  anthropol- 
atry  in  its  winged  bulls  and  eagle-headed  men.  Occasionally  we  find  an 
"over-all  deity"  having  a  totemic  name  for  every  part  of  his  body,  and 
some  deities  create  m^an  out  of  a  certain  animal  or  a  primal  creature 
rising  out  of  the  ground  or  sea,  or  he  comes  from  the  sky,  or  is  trans- 
formed perhaps  after  death  into  the  first  man.  Frazer  collects  very 
many  reincarnation  myths  of  this  kind.  In  one  case  the  name  is 
ascribed  to  the  fact  that  the  gens  had  Hved  so  long  on  the  flesh  of  a 
particular  animal  which  had  become  its  totem  that  its  quaUties  had 
passed  into  the  eaters.  Haddon^  found  that  in  the  Torres  Straits  the 
disposition  of  the  clan  members  was  supposed  to  reflect  the  character 
of  the  totem;  that  the  animal  was  often  extinct,  even  where  it  was 
revered  and  protected,  indicating  the  very  great  age  of  the  institution. 
He  described  elaborate  initiation  rites,  and  found  other  indications 
here  of  the  advance  along  the  line  which  the  race  must  have  taken  from 
the  worship  of  a  great  animal  to  that  of  a  great  man.  Among  the 
Malays,  who  were  highly  totemic,  he  often  found  personal  totems 
cultivated,  which  had  been  suggested  either  by  dreams  or  by  some 
exceptional  experience. 

The  totemic  theories  of  American  anthropologists,  based  largely 
upon  the  Indians  of  the  North-west  who  are  less  primitive  than  Austra- 
lians, show  that  the  very  word  totem  has  many  (Powell  says  from 
ten  to  fourteen)  different  meanings.  Hill-Tout  thinks  it  may  mean 
either  a  sacred  animal,  a  tribe,  the  name  of  a  rehgious  or  magic  society 
or  object,  an  hereditary  designation  of  kin,  or  even  an  individual. 
The  protective  animal,  guardian  spirit,  or  patron,  Powell  thinks,  always 
comes  from  the  Manitou  or  from  some  person  to  whom  the  animal  or 
object  was  revealed  by  an  inspired  dream  or  vision,  or  else  is  the  re- 
sult of  a  long  fast,  or  of  hypnotic  suggestion  during  initiation  to  adoles- 
cence. If  the  totem  kins  become  exogamous,  he  thinks  it  is  later  and 
by  treaty.    The  essence  of  totemism  here  is  the   spiritual   entity. 


'"History  of  Religion."    London,  1895,  p.  30. 

»"  Head-hunters."    London,  i go i.    Especially  Chapter  9. 


JESUS'  ETHICS  AND  PRAYER  481 

Boas  thinks  that  crests  or  totem  marks  perhaps  once  designated  a 
tutelary  spirit  or  genius.  There  is  certainly  vast  difference  between 
the  American  Indians  and  the  Pacific  Islanders  in  this  respect.  In- 
stead of  being  hereditary,  the  American  totem  is  often  acquired  in 
pubescent  trance.  Occasionally  there  are  myths  of  metamorphosis 
into  totemic  animals  or  approximation  of  each  to  the  habits  of  the 
other,  with  some  suggestion  of  metempsychosis. 

Some  believe  that  in  the  old  animal  epos  we  have  some  vestiges 
of  totemism.  For  instance  the  story  of  Reynard  the  Fox,^  the  most 
famous  of  the  best  cycles  or  epics,  gives  characteristic  names  as  well  as 
traits  which  were  recognized  all  over  Europe,  as  Noble,  the  lion;  Bel- 
Un,  the  lamb;  Bruin,  the  bear;  Baldwin,  the  ass;  Eisengrim,  the  wolf; 
Chanticleer,  the  cock,  etc.,  where  each  animal  represents  a  human  trait 
personified.  The  origin  of  the  story  of  Reynard  is  still  a  mystery. 
No  one  knows  whether  it  was  Oriental  or  possibly  astrological.  It 
certainly  represents  a  different  psychic  attitude  toward  animals  from 
that  represented  by  ^sop,  and  still  more  by  Uncle  Remus.  Zabism, 
too,  or  serpent  worship  and  the  art  of  snake  charmers  are  of  undoubted 
totemic  origin.^ 

Freud^  finds  the  key  to  totemism  in  the  child's  relation  to  animals. 
Children  often  have  an  Angsttier  or  an  animal  which  has  come  to  be 
especially  dreaded  and  in  which  they  therefore  have  a  special  interest. 
Occasionally  they  imitate  and  almost  personate,  as  well  as  dread,  this 
animal.  Accidents  of  the  individual's  experience  usually  determine 
what  animal  it  is,  but  Freud  holds  that  this  attitude  was  first  developed 
toward  the  child's  father  and  later  transferred  from  him  to  the  animal, 
which  may  be  loved  as  well  as  hated  at  the  same  time,  or  alternately. 
The  animal  may  appear  in  a  recurrent  dream,  as  in  pavor  nocturnus,  as 
savages  sometimes  find  their  totem.  A  boy  of  five  very  carefully 
analyzed  had  such  a  phobia  for  a  horse,  which  was  found  to  be  part  of 
an  " Oedipus  complex"  carried  over  from  the  father  to  the  horse,  which 
thereby  became  the  boy's  totem.  Wulff  found  the  same  transfer 
from  the  father  to  a  dog  in  a  boy  of  nine,  and  Ferenczi  describes  an- 
other to  all  kinds  of  waterfowl.  Toward  such  animals  children  very 
often  feel  a  strong  ambivalent  hate  and  love.    Hence  Freud  infers 


»See  Caxton:  "History  of  Reynard  the  Fox."    1481.    Also  Jacobs:  "The  Most  Delectable  History  of  Reynard 
the  Fox."    London,  1895.    Also  Goethe's  poetical  version  in  Dale's  edition,  Vol.  a. 
'See  W.  H.  D.  Adams:  "Curiosities  of  Superstition."    London,  1883.    Chapter  3. 
•"Totem  und  Tabu."    1913,  149  p. 


482  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

that  the  totemic  animal  is  really  the  father,  particularly  the  father  of 
the  clan,  who  was  a  severe  disciphnarian,  enforced  exogamy,  etc.  The 
two  commands  of  the  totem  are  that  the  animal  representing  it  must 
not  be  killed,  and  that  no  woman  inside  the  clan  can  be  married.  Both 
these  commands  Oedipus  broke.  After  the  totem  is  slain  the  attitude 
toward  him  is  reversed  and  he  is  revered  as  is  the  father  in  primitive 
parricide.  Thus  totemism  developed  from  the  father-surrogate  and 
from  a  sense  of  filial  guilt,  and  every  totem  and  every  god  were  fashioned 
on  the  pattern  of  the  father. 

In  our  day  of  hypertrophied  individuation,  egoism,  and  perhaps 
Teutonic  ideas  of  the  superman,  it  is  not  strange  that  Reinach  thinks 
totemism  a  hypertrophy  of  its  opposite,  viz.,  the  social  instinct.  But 
the  more  we  understand  this  central  problem  of  prehistoric  culture,  the 
more  we  realize  that  in  primitive  communities  the  indi\ddual  was  hardly 
less  subordinated  to  the  group  than  in  the  hive  or  the  formicary.  Its 
members  were  one  by  closer  bonds  than  those  of  classic  friendsliip  as 
characterized  by  Aristotle  and  Cicero  before  romantic  love  for  the 
other  sex,  as  Finck  describes  it,  arose.  It  bound  fellow  tribesmen 
into  a  unity  no  whit  less  deep  and  mystic,  and  in  some  respects  more  so, 
than  that  described  in  modern  amatory  literature.  Members  of  a 
totem  were  one  in  having  the  name  often  sacredly  secret,  at  a  time,  too, 
when  the  name  was  no  mere  nominahstic  flatus  vocis  but  almost  an 
entity,  giving  those  who  used  it  conjuring  power  over  those  to  whom  it 
was  applied.  They  were  one  by  partaking  of  a  common  meal,  eating 
commensally  the  same  divine  animal,  and  becoming  thereby  "milk 
brethren,"  as  if  born  from  the  same  mother.  All  who  ate  the  flesh  or 
drank  the  blood  of  the  same  god  became  thereby  one  in  him  as  he  is 
and  remains  one  in  them,  a  symbol  of  the  sacramental  tie  that  binds. 
They  were  one  so  closely  and  Uterally  that  to  marry  any  clan  member 
was  incest,  for  she  was  a  true  sister.  They  were  one  so  sacrosanctly 
that  members  could  exchange  their  very  souls,  so  that  we  have  here 
one  key  to  explain  metamorphosis,  and  transmigration  or  metem- 
psychosis. They  were  one  in  having  a  common  ancestor,  and  the 
totem  was  often  a  father-surrogate;  the  same  feehngs  and  attitudes 
developed  toward  the  father  or  perhaps  toward  the  head  of  the  clan, 
being  transferred  to  the  totem.  They  were  sometimes  one,  too,  in  a 
special  sense  on  great  festivals  and  corroborees,  where  in  states  of 
social  exaltation  they  partly  projected  their  ecstatic  sense  of  unity. 


JESUS'  ETHICS  AND  PRAYER  483 

and  universalized  it  in  a  sense  of  one  pre-animistic  and  all-including 
ontological  principle  called  variously  Mana,  wakanda,  etc.  Thus 
the  psychic  foundation  was  laid  deep  and  early  for  man's  passion  both 
for  pantheistic  absorption  and  fusion  with  the  universe,  and  also  for 
the  no-less-passionate  affirmation  of  monotheism,  and  even  monism; 
for  all  have  here  the  same  psychogenic  root,  viz.,  the  feeling  of  one  soul 
in  different  bodies,  which  every  great  exaltation  of  the  social  instinct 
brings.  Thus  in  some  small,  close,  and  primitive  communities  an 
e  pluribus  unum  feeling  developed  in  man,  the  gregariousness  of  which 
is  without  precedent,  for  it  was  so  strong  that  it  explained  all  other 
social  and,  perhaps,  intellectual  unities,  which  are  best  understood 
anthropomorphically  as  symbols  of  this  social  union. 

On  this  view,  the  cardinal  attitudes,  Einsklhmgen,  and  deter- 
mining tendencies  of  the  New  Testament  conserve  for  us  the  best 
achievements  of  many  thousand  years  of  prehistoric  culture.  In  this 
era  of  small  communities,  the  members  of  which  were  indiscerptibly 
bound  together,  each  to  each,  and  which  felt,  acted,  and  thought  in 
common,  between  the  individuals  of  which  altruism  and  mutual  help 
had  their  golden  age;  in  these  social  groups  which  were  in  the  closest 
rapport  also  with  animals,  plants,  celestial  phenomena,  seasonal 
changes,  and  nature  generally,  were  laid  the  foundations  of  all  religions. 
In  the  maxims  of  subordination  of  self  to  the  service  of  the  group 
Christianity  thus  conserves  and  refines  for  us  the  most  precious  legacy 
of  the  most  unrecorded  past,  the  vestiges  of  which  are  like  those  of  a 
lost  Atlantis.  If  in  such  a  close  community  one  individual  broke  the 
bonds  and  smote  or  robbed  a  tribal  kinsman,  to  invite  him  to  smite 
again  or  to  rob  more  would  bring  the  automatic  social  reaction  that 
would  correct  the  aggression,  while  to  resent  evil  or  aggravate  enmity 
would  tend  to  the  disruption  and  ruin  of  the  group.  This  was  only  a 
far  greater  degree  of  the  results  of  such  action  to-day  in  the  family,  where 
harmony  is  the  first  law  and  where  almost  any  price  is  not  too  great  to 
pay  for  peace.  The  history  and  psychology  of  Quakerism  aptly  illus- 
trate the  practical  efficiency  of  these  precepts,  and  in  Jesus'  day  aU  this 
was  intensely  reinforced  by  the  expectation  of  a  speedy  end  of  the  world, 
in  view  of  which  all  personal  ends  sank  to  insignificance.  We  might 
approximate  this  ethical  standpoint  if  we  could  consider  all  who  wrong 
us  as  diseased,  and  therefore  irresponsible,  and  to  be  pitied  as  if  insane 
or  morally  defective.    Moreover,  yielding  to  those  not  irreclaimably 


484  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

violent  tends  to  bring  about  in  them  the  countervalent  sentiments  of 
sympathy  toward  their  victim,  and  thus  has  a  paUiative,  if  not  pre- 
ventive, effect.  A  community  actuated  by  the  self-effacing  morality 
of  Jesus  would  need  no  laws,  courts,  nor  penalties,  and  is  found  only 
in  primitive  societies  such  as  in  some  respects,  as  has  often  been  pointed 
out.  Homer  describes.  Again,  ideal  motherhood,  and  the  less  often 
sacred  ideal,  fatherhood,  also  commended  by  Aristotle,  ethical  culture 
of  the  Desjardins  type,  some  text-books  of  morals,  and  some  of  the 
types  of  Christian  sociaHsm  as  it  has  been  so  voluminously  and  vari- 
ously described  of  late,  have  kept  alive  at  least  a  pale  afterglow  of  the 
ethics  of  Jesus.  We  are  already  beginning  to  suspect  that  the  sick,  the 
defective,  and  dependent,  and  the  disinherited  generally,  who  from 
the  eugenic  point  of  view  alone  considered  ought  to  be  ehminated, 
really  perform  a  great  function  in  keeping  alive  the  spirit  of  sympathy 
and  charity,  which  would  shrivel  without  them,  and  that  not  only  they, 
but  criminals,  are  necessary  for  the  greatest  good  of  the  community  as 
a  whole.  Now,  of  course,  social  ties  are  weakened  by  being  expanded 
centrifugally  from  the  small  family  group  to  ever  wider  and  often  al- 
most cosmic  dimensions,  and  egoism,  self-assertion,  and  aggrandize- 
ment are  the  chief  traits  of  most  of  the  historic  ages,  and  especially  of 
our  own. 

The  last  very  few  thousand  years  of  man's  existence,  which  we 
call  the  historic  period,  are  but  a  few  minutes  of  the  day  since  he  began; 
and  during  much  of  this  era  we  must  admit  that  man  has  been  pretty 
selfish.  But  it  was  not  so  of  old,  as  we  have  seen;  and  it  will  not  be  so 
when  he  reaches  his  normal  maturity.  Psychoanalysis  describes  as 
Narcissism  cases  in  which  all  the  love  of  a  child  is  focussed  upon  his  own 
person,  before  affection  has  found  its  proper  object  in  others.  In  some 
neurotics  we  find  arrest  at  this  stage.  The  patient  indulges  a  silly 
vanity,  seems  to  fall  in  love  with  his  own  body,  which  he  admires, 
pampers,  and  often  vents  all  his  eroticism  upon.  Selfishness  is  moral 
Narcissism,  and  induces  self-magnification  and  indulgence,  or  in  a 
word  it  is  a  kind  of  moral  self-abuse.  Mankind  is  in  this  pubescent 
stage,  and  is  afflicted  with  its  most  characteristic  epidemic.  Whether 
the  race  will  reach  ethical  maturity  or  suffer  permanent  arrest,  per- 
version, or  regression,  as  if  smitten  with  phyletic  moral  dementia 
praecox,  is  the  supreme  question  of  culture  and  progress.  The  Chris- 
tian Ufe  is  above  all  things  else  a  life  so  utterly  devoted  to  goods  and 


JESUS'  ETHICS  AND  PRAYER  485 

worths,  and  that  so  transcends  self,  that  self  would  be  freely  sacrificed 
at  any  time  and  in  any  way  if  the  interests  of  the  whole  could  thus  be 
best  advanced.  No  man  has  reached  his  ethical  majority  who  would 
not  die  if  the  real  interests  of  the  community  could  thus  be  fur- 
thered. If  complete,  each  man  is  always  at  least  a  potential  hero  or 
even  martyr.  What  would  the  world  be  without  the  values  that  have 
been  bought  at  the  price  of  death?  Now  even  religion  rarely  demands 
this  supreme  test,  but  it  does  demand  loyalty  to  truth,  right,  and  the 
common  weal.  These  often  require  the  sacrifice  of  means,  of  comfort. 
They  necessitate  the  repression  of  every  rancour  and  hate;  they  refine 
fear  for  self  into  fear  for  others,  and  make  us  fear  evil  for  them  more 
than  we  fear  it  for  ourselves.  As  I  write,  thousands  of  men  are  vastly 
increasing  the  risk  of  death  or  mayhem  for  causes  they  deem  worth  the 
risk.  A  militancy  that  brings  life  as  a  sacrifice  ready  to  be  offered  up, 
if  called  for,  calls  out  again  a  new  and  larger  perspective  and  rouses 
deeper  and  more  generic  forces  in  the  soul.  To  his  own  superiors  the 
soldier  must  illustrate  meekness  and  submission,  and  to  his  mates  a 
confraternity  of  the  sermon  on  the  mount.  But  all  this  intensified 
esprit  de  corps  makes  him  more  terrible  to  his  enemies.  Among  those 
who  stay  at  home,  too,  all  barriers  of  rank,  station,  wealth,  party,  and 
often  blood  are  broken,  and  a  new  solidarity  supervenes,  while  toward 
the  enemy  racial  hates  are  augmented  and  new  ones  developed.  Thus 
there  is  regression  as  between  the  larger  units  and  toward  ancient  tribal 
relations  of  hostiHty .  Within  the  national  units ,  the  Kingdom  of  Christ ; 
without,  that  of  Antichrist,  is  advanced.  Within,  all  aversions  are 
reduced;  without,  they  are  intensified.  There  is  more  benevolence 
at  home,  and  more  malevolence  abroad.  At  home  there  are  more 
Christian  forbearance,  toleration,  and  closer  bonds;  and  without,  there 
are  relapse  toward  the  barbaric  rules  of  the  jungle  and  its  hate  and 
aggression.  Meanwhile,  we  can  only  hope  and  pray  that  the  good 
within  may  prove  greater  and  more  lasting  than  the  relapse  of  outer 
relations.  If  only  external  dangers  prove  to  confirm  and  advance  inner 
harmonization,  the  aggregate  good  may  exceed  that  of  evil,  and  the 
psychic  and  material  havoc  of  the  conflict  may  be  offset  by  gains. 
That  we  may  hope  for  this  issue  we  have  seen  many  indications  in  the 
latter  part  of  Chapter  2. 

Can  we  infer  anything  concerning  Jesus'  attitude  to  culture  in  our 
sense,  especially  to  science,  the  greatest  achievement  of  modern  man? 


486  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

Here  (and  perhaps  we  should  ask  the  same  question  concerning  modern 
industrialism  and  society)  we  touch  the  greatest  and  sorest  of  all  issues 
between  Jesus'  view  of  the  world  and  our  own.  His  conceptions  of  the 
cosmos  were  infantile  and  in  no  respect  in  advance  of  his  age.  Of 
nearly  everything  taught  in  modern  universities  he  knew  nothing, 
while  of  literature,  even  that  of  classic  Greece  and  Rome,  and  of  fac- 
tories and  modern  institutions  generally  he  does  not  seem  to  have  had 
the  slightest  anticipation.  Neither  did  he  have  even  an  inkling  of 
the  satisfaction  Socrates  found  in  response  to  the  Delphic  Oracle, 
which  called  him  the  wisest  of  men  because  he  knew  that  he  knew 
nothing. 

Is  there  any  sense  in  which  Browning  was  right  in  saying,  "  Mind 
is  nothing  but  disease,  and  natural  health  is  ignorance?"  Has  man 
to-day  so  run  to  brain  that  this  organ  has  outgrown  its  correlation 
with  others,  as  Keridon^  says?  Has  the  vast  luggage  of  knowledge 
that  has  accumulated,  and  that  we  have  had  to  develop  all  the  vast 
and  comphcated  machinery  of  education  to  transmit,  made  man  forget 
the  oracles  within  his  soul  in  the  sense  in  which  Plato  reproached 
Aristotle  with  being  a  "  reader  "  or  dealer  in  other  people's  ideas  instead 
of  a  creator  of  them  at  first  hand?  Surely  Jesus  looked  mthin  for  his 
truth  even  more  than  did  Plato,  just  as  his  Kingdom  involved  a  closer 
coenaesthesis  between  its  members  than  did  the  Republic.  Indeed, 
iides  quaerens  intellectum  might  be  called  the  noetic  formula  of  Jesus* 
psychic  development.  Moreover,  in  him  conscience  was  coextensive 
with  consciousness.  Knowledge  of  right  and  wrong,  good  and  evil, 
if,  as  Lecky  and  Buckle  thought,  the  slowest,  is  also  the  most  precious 
of  all  kinds  of  knowledge,  for  it  is  a  union  of  knowing  and  doing,  of 
Kennen  and  Kbnnen.  The  leaves  on  the  tree  of  life  are  not,  like  those 
on  the  tree  of  knowledge,  deciduous.  To  be  completely  Christian 
must  we  not  assume  that  all  knowledge  that  is  not  for  the  sake,  not 
merely  of  action  but  more  specifically  of  moral  action,  is  sophism,  and 
is  not  this  indeed  the  trend  of  modern  pragmatism?  For  Kant  science 
was  a  soUd  island  that  had  arisen  in  the  midst  of  a  vast  stormy,  foggy 
sea  of  nescience.  Perhaps,  after  all,  we  have  magnified  both  the  extent 
and  the  importance  of  its  domain,  so  that  through  pride  we  have  lost 
the  true  perspective  of  values  and  needed  "the  Galilean  peasant  to 


»"Man:  the  Prodigy  and  Freak  of  Nature,  or,  an  Animal  Run  to  Brain."     The  Samurai  Press,  Cranleifb,  Surrey, 
igo7. 6a  p. 


JESUS'  ETHICS  AND  PRAYER  487 

set  us  right,"  somewhat  as  Tolstoi  found  his  lost  cue  in  the  simple 
life  of  a  humble  worker.  Must  we,  as  Hauptmann  assumed,  be  foolish 
to  be  Christian  to-day?  Has  Jesus  become  an  anachronism,  a  person- 
age of  now  only  historic  importance,  whom  we  have  transcended,  and 
can  approach  again  only  by  reverting  to  a  lower  stage  of  development? 
How  could  he  who  knew  so  little  which  we  deem  of  prime  importance 
be  called  the  Truth  and  the  Light?  These  are  the  questions  that  have 
seethed  in  cultivated  souls  throughout  Christendom  for  centuries,  and 
still  agitate  the  minds,  especially  of  young  students.  The  answer  given 
to  them  by  the  Church  without  or  by  individual  conviction  within 
has  resulted  in  the  fact  that  the  learned  world  to-day  is  either  indif- 
ferent or  hostile,  or  else  under  the  obsession  that  some  accommodation 
must  be  wrought  out,  however  tortuous  and  unnatural;  or,  finally, 
in  the  sad  fact  that  souls  have  been  split  into  two  compartments  or 
registers,  one  confirming  and  the  other  forgetting  or  denying  the  au- 
thority of  the  Great  Teacher. 

One  thing  is  certain,  viz.,  no  answer  can  be  admitted  that  is  based 
on  any  disparagement  of  science.  If  the  alternative  is  science  or 
Jesus,  the  latter  will  be  sure  eventually  to  go;  but  there  is  and  can  be 
no  such  alternative.  Our  answer  is,  in  brief,  as  follows:  Science  began 
in  general  with  inanimate,  and  then  slowly  proceeded  to  animate 
nature;  and  last  of  all,  in  every  land  where  it  has  had  a  history,  as, 
e.  g.,  in  ancient  Greece,  it  found  its  consummation  in  the  study  of 
man.  To-day  sociology,  anthropology,  and  psychology  are  in  their 
infancy.  The  soul  of  man,  individual  and  collective,  is  the  highest, 
last,  and  most  difficult  of  all  themes  (as  self-knowledge  is  the  noblest 
kind  of  knowledge),  the  solution  of  which  both  depends  on  and  ex- 
plains all  that  precedes,  assigns  correct  values,  and  reveals  relative 
importance  and  perspective.  To  this  field  Jesus  almost  solely  directed 
his  endeavours.  In  his  conception  of  the  Kingdom  we  have  the 
results  of  his  insights  into  human  society;  in  his  ideas  of  sin  and  salva- 
tion, we  have  his  general  doctrine  of  man;  and  in  his  character,  life- 
work,  precepts,  and  fate,  we  have  the  key  to  all  the  chief  themes 
involving  the  moral  activity  of  the  individual.  In  the  ways  in  which 
the  soul  of  the  race  prepared  for  him  before  his  advent  in  the  older  ethnic 
religions  about  the  eastern  Mediterranean,  and  in  the  ways  in  which  it 
has  reacted  to  it  since,  we  have  all  the  essentials  of  folk  psychology. 
There  is,  of  course  in  addition,  a  psychology  of  the  senses,  memory, 


488  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

association,  attention,  etc.,  and  there  are  many  studies  in  the  mechan- 
ism of  psychic  processes;  and  such  work  has  a  very  significant  past  and 
will  have  a  yet  greater  future  development.  To  critical  and  exegetical 
New  Testament  scholarship  Christology  owes  an  inestimable  debt 
and  may  possibly  come  to  owe  yet  more  (although  many  think  its  great 
work  is  accompUshed).  But  the  psychology  that  is  at  once  dynamic, 
genetic,  and  pragmatic,  and  can  penetrate  below  the  shallow  surface 
of  consciousness  to  the  unconscious  depths  below,  finds  in  the  great 
Galilean  both  the  master  craftsman  in  psychodynamics,  and  in  the 
collective  records  of  him  the  richest  of  all  the  fields  for  further  explora- 
tion. Here  he  is  not  below  but  far  ahead  of  present-day  science.  Here 
das  ewige  Christliche  zieht  tins  hinan.  He  knew  and  compelled  the 
individual  and  collective  soul  as  no  one  else  ever  began  to  do.  He  is 
the  centre  of  the  greatest  psychic  synthesis  ever  yet  made,  and  from 
this  viewpoint  as  from  most  others,  it  makes  vastly  less  difference  than 
was  till  very  lately  thought  how  much  of  his  majestic  figure  is  historic 
and  how  much  a  "focus  of  projection  of  the  optimal  ideals  of  the  race." 
Thus,  if  he  did  not  know  the  sciences  of  nature  he  knew  that  of  man, 
their  maker.  His  psychology  was  not  that  of  the  schools  any  more 
than  is  the  botany  of  Burbank  or  the  physics  of  Edison,  but  like  them 
he  controlled  natural  agencies  and  brought  out  beneficent  practical 
results.  We  can  hardly  assume  that  Jesus  would  not  welcome  all 
sciences  that  bring  forth  fruits  or,  indeed,  any  and  every  kind  of 
knowledge  that  means  service.  In  Chapter  2  we  saw  how  many 
noveHsts  and  playwrights  have  described  Jesus  in  various  callings  and 
situations  in  modern  fife,  but  no  one  has  ever  attempted  yet  to  present 
him  in  the  modern  laboratory,  seminary,  Hbrary,  or  even  clinic,  and 
we  rarely  see  his  picture  or  image  in  any  of  these  places.  But  this  will 
doubtless  yet  come.  As  we  have  seen  as  a  result  of  the  war  so  many 
new  conceptions  of  Jesus  as  a  soldier,  so  a  vital  growing  Christianity 
will  take  him  wherever  good  men  go  with  heart  and  purpose. 
-^  The  evolution  of  prayer  began  probably  with  that  of  man  himself. 
It  is  perhaps  the  only  common  trait  of  all  religions,  their  very  heart, 
and  the  most  universal  expression  of  piety.  It  is  always  optative  or 
expressive  of  some  wish,  either  to  obtain  some  good  or  avoid  some 
evil.  It  is  often  accompanied  by  rites  and  ceremonies,  or  reinforced 
by  magic  spells,  or  perhaps  by  the  mimetic  acts  suggestive  or  symbolic 
of  the  desire,  while  the  speech  forms  are  often  stereotyped,  and  potent 


JESUS'  ETHICS  AND  PRAYER  489 

phrases  or  incantations.^  "The  roots  of  prayer  are  older  than  all 
creeds  and  cannot  be  deduced  or  derived  from  them."  Fielding  Hall 
thinks  it  inconsistent  that  the  Buddhist  women  of  Burma  pray  pas- 
sionately at  the  shrines  of  their  deity,  because  he  has  entered  Nirvana 
and  can  neither  hear  nor  answer.  But  prayer  does  not  need  to  be 
addressed  to  any  one,  so  aboriginal  and  primordial  is  "the  soul's 
sincere  desire  uttered  or  unexpressed."  Its  answer,  too,  is  subjective, 
its  issue  often  being  simply  acquiescence,  power  to  accept  the  inevit- 
able with  joy,  so  that  if  prayer  is  a  true  cause,  it  is  so  only  by  setting 
free  energy  within.  So  one  can  pray  to  malign  powers  or  to  nothing. 
Some  think  that  prayer  developed  the  gods  themselves,  and  that  their 
continued  existence  depends  upon  it.  Among  most  lower  races  it  is 
regarded  as  a  kind  of  projection  of  will-power  to  influence  a  supernal 
being,  somewhat  as  one  influences  his  friends. 

It  is  very  different  to-day  with  our  vastly  enlarged  conceptions 
of  the  universe  and  of  law.  Compared  with  some  of  the  thousands 
of  millions  of  stars  our  sun  itself  is  of  insignificant  size,  and  the  in- 
dividual on  our  tiny  planet  shrivels  to  a  microbe,  so  that  ideas  of 
special  providential  answers  can  be  no  longer  held.  The  child  and  the 
savage  have  more  or  less  definite  conceptions  of  whom  they  are  ad- 
dressing, but  this  is  no  longer  possible,  for  many  pray  to  nothing  more 
definite  than  a  vast  diffusive  power.  Again,  whoever  or  whatever 
is  addressed  is  now  regarded  as  less  objective  and  more  immanent. 
As  Coe^  well  says,  we  do  not  conceive  that  the  God  of  prayer  and  the 
God  of  nature  are  opposed  or  even  distinct,  so  that  the  more  law  there 
is,  the  less  God,  nor  do  we  think  of  a  supernatural  over  against  a  natural 
realm.  Nor  are  prayer  and  a  hfe  of  piety  so  much  spHt  off  or  set  apart 
for  set  hours  or  places,  nor  is  the  soul  partitioned.  Prayer  is  etymologi- 
cally  a  request  so  that  we  should  expect  those  that  have  most  wants  to 
be  most  in  need  of  it.  But  the  Church  is  more  prosperous  and  com- 
fortable to-day  than  ever  before;  and  if  these  blessings  are  answers 
to  prayer,  then  the  latter  tends  to  its  own  elimination,  because  men 
are  more  and  more  able  to  help  themselves.  The  rich  certainly  do  not 
feel  the  need  of  praying  for  food,  shelter,  clothing,  as  do  those  in 
adversity.    In  prayer  man  wants  something  done  for  or  given  him, 


»L.  R.  Farnell:  "The  Evolution  of  Religion."  London,  1905.  R.  Marett:  "From  Spell  to  Prayer."  Folklore, 
1904,  Vol.  IS,  p.  132.  D.  G.  Brinton:  "The  Religions  of  Priinitive  Peoples."  New  York,  1897.  H.. Fielding  Hall:  "The 
Hearts  of  Men."    New  York,  1901. 

»"The  Religion  of  a  Mature  Mind."    New  York,  1903. 


490  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

and  we  wrestle  and  argue  with  God  in  many  ways.  We  remind 
him  (a)  that  he  is  so  rich  that  giving  does  not  impoverish  him;  (b) 
he  is  so  powerful  that  he  could  help  with  no  effort,  but  would 
need  only  to  speak  and  it  would  be  done,  and  he  could  aid  us 
with  no  fatigue;  (c)  of  the  great  help  he  has  rendered  others  in 
ancient  times,  Abraham,  Isaac,  the  manna  and  quails,  etc.;  (d) 
how  wretched  and  mean  and  weak  we  are,  prone  to  evil.  As  if 
we  had  a  phobia  of  provoking  the  envy  of  our  gods  such  as  the 
Greeks  feared,  we  indulge  in  patheticism,  as  if  to  excite  his  pity,  pos- 
sibly under  the  momentum  of  the  old  instinct  of  sacrifice  of  self;  or 
perhaps  this  prayer  motive,  if  psychoanalyzed,  would  be  an  attempt 
to  praise  God  by  the  subtle  method  of  contrast,  or  to  point  out  to  him 
what  an  opportunity  our  extremity  is.  (e)  We  plead  promises  of 
receiving  for  asking,  recalling  all  the  pledges  of  the  old  covenant,  as 
if  he  might  forget  or  not  live  up  to  his  contract,  or  as  if  he  had  aroused 
great  expectations  which  we  often  identify  with  faith,  (f)  We  seek 
further  to  insinuate  ourselves  into  divine  favour  by  assurances  of  joy 
and  gratitude  if  the  largess  we  seek  is  given,  so  that  we  can  feel  our- 
selves the  favourites  of  heaven;  and  our  most  vociferous  thanksgivings 
are  of  course  often  subtly  tinged  with  a  lively  sense  of  benefits  to  come, 
(g)  We  plead  that  we  are  loved,  for  he  is  love;  that  his  bounty  is 
universal  for  saints  and  sinners  alike;  and  that  he  often  delights  to  do 
the  most  for  the  worst,  (h)  We  realize  that  a  just  God  must  be  angr>^ ; 
that  a  trivial  sin  against  infinite  justice  becomes  itself  infinite,  and 
perhaps  deserving  an  infinite  punishment;  but  here  we  plead  the  alien 
merits  of  the  great  victim.  We  magnify  the  agony  of  the  cross  as  our 
only  plea.  Its  pains  were  sufficient  to  compensate  for  the  sins  of  the 
world,  and  poor  debtors  though  we  are,  we  seek  indemnity  and  the 
cancellation  of  penalty  as  beneficiaries  of  the  great  atonement  fund. 
We  argue  with  the  Divine  that  instead  of  holding  us  personally  respon- 
sible he  set  us  free,  and  draw  on  the  supererogatory  virtue  which  the 
Great  Patron  has  placed  to  our  account,  as  if  his  pains  could  coerce 
mercy,  and  there  could  be  no  danger  of  overdraft.  By  all  these  catego- 
ries we  pray,  plead,  beg,  urge,  for  health,  success,  prosperity,  for  ourselves 
and  our  friends,  often  with  a  selfishness  so  narrow  that  if  our  petitions 
were  granted  others  would  be  incalculably  injured.  We  make  a  virtue 
of  an  importunity  that  cannot  be  denied  or  put  off.  We  would  weary 
God  out.    Our  hearts  pant  with  the  fervour  of  desire,  as  if  heaven 


JESUS'  ETHICS  AND  PRAYER  491 

hesitated  and  needed  to  be  coaxed  and  teased.  There  is  thus  often 
an  inordinate  greed  in  prayer.  Some  prayers,  of  course,  could  not  be 
answered,  for  they  are  contradictory  or  violate  the  order  of  things; 
and  if  all  were  answered,  prayer  itself  would  be  obsolete  because  there 
would  be  nothing  left  to  pray  for  unless  for  the  power  to  conceive  still 
greater  gifts. 

The  Christian  consciousness  has  rightly  shrunk  from  any  attempt 
to  make  any  of  the  scientific  tests  which  skeptics  have  proposed,  es- 
pecially since  the  day  of  Tyndall's  prayer  gauge.  It  properly  resents 
any  form  of  experimentum  cruets  to  see  whether  of  two  like  things  under 
like  conditions  the  one  prayed  for  would  have  a  little  advantage. 
Perhaps  the  whole  world  as  a  battery  of  prayer  with  its  very  exis- 
tence staked  upon  the  outcome,  could  not  make  a  fiUiped  coin  fall 
differently.  Probably  very  few  indeed  of  all  man's  prayers  have  in 
any  sense  been  answered,  because  he  lacks  the  genius  to  pray  aright 
save  in  the  most  general  terms.  No  faith  can  be  strong  enough  to 
accomplish  what  is  not  in  the  nature  of  things,  for  true  faith  is  only 
anticipated  history.  Prayer  should  only  direct  and  put  an  edge  on 
work,  and  be  in  the  Hne  of  tendencies  that  are  conformable  to  the  laws 
of  nature  and  of  the  human  heart.  One  writer  suggests  that  in  a 
universe  made  up  of  spiritual  beings  a  strong  desire  of  any  one  of  them 
would  slightly  influence  all  the  others,  as  the  earth  rises  to  meet  a 
falling  feather;  but  this  exiguous  and  infinitesimal  possibility  rests  on  a 
special  hypothesis  of  the  universe  which  will  appeal  to  but  few. 

Tylor  shows  that  prayer  is  almost  coextensive  with  animism,  and 
that  perhaps  all,  even  the  lowest  savages,  lead  Uves  abounding  in 
prayer.  A.  J.  Nutt,  in  "Ossian  and  the  Ossianic  Literature"  (1899), 
says:  "A  nail  driven  into  a  wooden  idol  is  a  prayer,  and  so  is  a  pin 
dropped  into  a  sacred  well."  These  are  often  selfish  invocations, 
perhaps  of  their  fetishes,  for  success  in  head-hunting.  When  we  realize 
how  man  is  always  prone  in  great  undertakings,  in  panics  or  in  grief,  to 
cry  out  for  help,  as  if  prayer  were  ahnost  an  automatism,  even  though 
it  be  a  monologue  or  love  chant,  we  reahze  how,  up  and  down  the 
whole  scale  of  culture,  man  has  always  been  a  praying  animal.  Indeed, 
prayer  has  its  pathology,  may  become  a  monomania  or  deUrium,  as 
well  as  worked  by  a  machine.  Criminals  pray  for  success  in  crime, 
gamblers  for  lucky  numbers.  Prayer  may  be  hardly  more  than  a  sob, 
or  may  lead  to  syncope.    It  may  be  a  periodic  impulse  without  any 


492  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

muezzin  or  angelus.  Some  think  its  canticles  based  on  a  specific  emo- 
tion or  a  distinct  faculty.  Most  hymns  are  simply  prayers.  The 
New  Caledonian  kindles  a  fire  to  increase  the  heat  of  the  sun  which  he 
addresses,  saying,  "  I  do  this  that  you  may  be  hotter."  The  Karens 
in  thrashing  rice  call  to  the  corn-mother  to  shake  herself  that  the  paddy- 
hill  may  grow  as  large  as  a  mountain.  Some  Sioux  formulae  involve 
endearing  phrases  of  kinship,  and  the  wish  is  uttered  with  the  sacrifice. 
Countless  ceremonies  attend  prayers.  Quaint  forms  of  words  are 
often  used,  e.  g.,  in  dispatching  the  ghost  of  the  dead  to  its  home.  A 
Vedic  hymn  says,  "Thou,  O  Agni,  art  our  father,  and  we  thy  kinsmen." 
A  Babylonian  prayer  begins:  "I  have  no  mother;  thou  art  my  mother. 
I  have  no  father;  thou  art  my  father."  Some  prayers  are  spell  narra- 
tives on  the  idea  that  talking  of  a  thing  causes  it  to  happen.  Much 
medicine  magic  aims  at  purification.  The  African  witch  doctor  holds 
his  fetish  up  over  the  patient  and  prays,  "Father  heaven,  bless  this 
medicine."  The  Klonds  conclude  all  their  prayers  for  special  favours 
with  the  phrase,  "We  are  ignorant  of  what  is  good  for  us;  you  know; 
give  it  to  us."  Giesbrecht  in,  "Die  alttestamentliche  Schatzung  des 
Gottesnamens, "  shows  the  wondrous  power  ascribed  to  the  divine  name. 
The  Latin  pontifices  concealed  it  lest  it  be  wrongly  used,  and  Euripides 
speaks  of  the  wise  man  "who  knows  the  silent  names  of  the  gods." 
The  Greek  Hturgies  sometimes  enumerate  several  epithets,  or  call  on 
the  God  of  many  names.  A  chorus  in  Aesculapius  says,  "Zeus,  who- 
ever the  god  is,  if  this  name  of  Zeus  is  dear  to  him,  by  this  name  I 
appeal."  So,  in  India,  Agni  is  immortal  and  of  many  names,  and  the 
Egyptian  Ra  has  manifold  names  unknown  even  to  the  gbds.  So  the 
name  Yahveh  was  sacred,  if  not  potent,  and  the  Christian  is  baptized 
into  the  name  of  Christ.  Not  only  does  knowing  the  name  of  the 
deity  give  power  over  him,  but  to  know  his  origin  works  as  a  charm. 
The  Veda  says,  "0  sleep,  we  know  thy  breath;  thou  art  the  ender, 
death;  protect  us  from  evil  dreams,"  etc.  The  ancient  Germans 
thought  the  rune  the  rival  if  not  the  parent  of  prayer,  and  in  the 
Middle  Ages  the  Holy  Ghost  was  a  name  thought  to  make  blood,  skin, 
and  bone  grow  again  after  injury. 

Even  in  ancient  England  the  prayer  charm  was  used  against 
sterility  of  the  land,  much  as  in  ancient  Greece  agricultural  petitions 
were  uttered.  The  devotee  glancing  into  the  sky  simply  said,  "Rain 
and  conceive."    Similar  spells  were  used  for  human  fertihty.    The 


JESUS'  ETHICS  AND  PRAYER  493 

Romans  were  prone  to  invoke  the  spirits  of  ancestors,  held  that  there 
was  great  power  in  repetition,  dancing  and  in  uttering  the  words,  "lo 
triumphe.^^  The  famous  Roman  address  to  Jupiter  in  the  days  of 
Hannibal's  War  was  a  legal  document  shrewdly  drawn  to  bind  both 
the  god  and  the  state.  Greece  had  an  official  liturgy  containing  curses 
on  certain  offences  against  the  state,  and  both  Jews  and  Christians 
have  curse  formulae  consecrating  their  victim  to  the  lower  world  and 
constraining  the  very  gods.  A  savage  oath  says,  "  May  this  fetish  slay 
me  if  I  do  not  fulfil  this  contract."  Socrates  commended  the  Spartans 
for  not  praying  for  particular  gifts,  but  only  for  what  was  beautiful 
and  good.  Very  lofty  is  Pindar's  prayer:  "May  I  walk,  0  God,  in  the 
guileless  paths  of  life  and  leave  behind  me  a  fair  name  for  my  children," 
and  "0  God  that  bringest  all  things  to  pass,  grant  me  the  spirit  of 
reverence  for  noble  things."  Euripides  prays:  "May  the  spirit  of 
chastity,  the  fairest  gift  of  God,  abide  with  me,"  and  in  a  much-used 
banquet  song  the  Greeks  prayed,  "O  Pallas,  born  of  waters.  Queen 
Athene,  may  thou  and  thy  father  keep  this  city  and  its  citizens  in 
prosperity,  free  from  sorrow,  civic  discord,  and  untimely  death." 
Xenophon  prays,  for  "  Good  Hfe,  bodily  strength,  good  feeUng  among 
friends,  safety  in  war,  and  wealth."  Socrates  prays:  "  Grant  me  to  be- 
come noble  of  heart";  Apollonius,  "0  gods,  grant  me  that  which  I 
deserve  " ;  Plato,  "  King  Zeus,  grant  us  the  good,  whether  we  pray  for  it 
or  not,  but  keep  the  evil  from  us,  though  we  pray  for  it."  Epictetus 
prayed:  "Do  with  me  what  thou  wilt.  Thy  will  is  my  will."  And 
the  early  Stoics  prayed:  "Lead  me,  0  God,  and  I  will  follow  willingly, 
if  I  am  wise,  but  if  not  willingly  still  I  will  follow."  Some  philosophical 
Christians  early  raised  the  question  whether  special  prayers  were 
justified,  and  it  was  on  this  view  that  the  Pythagoreans  at  one  time 
forbade  prayer  because  the  gods  know  better  what  to  give  than  men 
do  what  to  ask.  They  also  held  that  all  prayer  should  be  aloud,  so 
that  no  one  would  pray  for  anything  he  would  be  ashamed  for  others  to 
hear.  Neo-Platonism  stressed  the  idea  of  communion  with  God. 
The  only  prayer  of  Apuleius  was,  "that  thou  wouldst  be  willing  to 
keep  us  all  our  lives  in  the  love  of  knowledge."  The  Vedic  thought 
was  that  the  gods  uphold  the  sky  and  do  all  their  work  by  prayer. 
A  very  ancient  prayer  is,  "With  my  mind  do  I  seize  your  mind,"  and 
again,  to  Agni,  "May  we  be  well-doers  before  the  gods,"  and  again, 
"Give  us  not  up,  O  Agni,  to  want  of  thought;  make  us  sinless  before 


494  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

Aditi;  put  far  away  the  sins  of  the  mind;  enter  into  smoke,  0  sin,  go 
into  the  vapours,  and  into  the  fog."  With  such  prayers  often  went 
potent  symbols  of  purification.  Among  the  Iranians  a  real  spell  could 
accompany  only  a  real  prayer,  the  text  of  which  was  very  potent  in  the 
hands  of  the  "sacerdotal  physician."  He  prays,  "Give  us,  Ahura, 
that  powerful  sovereignty  by  the  strength  of  which  we  may  smite 
down  the  sickness  demon,"  and  then,  turning  to  it,  he  says,  "To  thee, 

0  sickness,  I  say  avaunt;  to  thee,  0  death,  I  say  avaunt."  The  holy 
word  is  of  such  a  nature  that  if  all  the  corporeal  and  living  world  should 
learn  it  and,  learning,  hold  fast  to  it,  they  would  be  redeemed  from 
their  mortaUty.  The  Persian  prayers  are  even  higher  than  the  Vedic 
in  their  conception  of  righteousness.  Before  rising  the  pious  Persian 
prays,  "All  good  thoughts,  all  good  words,  all  good  deeds,  I  do  will- 
ingly. All  evil  thoughts,  all  evil  words,  all  evil  deeds,  I  do  unwillingly. 
May  we  help  bring  on  the  good  government  of  Ahura."  "How  may 
man  become  most  like  unto  thee?  I  implore  through  the  good  mind  a 
kingdom  for  myself,  through  whose  increase  I  may  conquer  the  he." 
In  Babylon  Marduk  is  often  invoked  as  the  arch  magician  and  there 
were  experts  and  spells  in  purification,  and  yet  lofty  types  of  faith  that 
"prayer  absolves  from  sin."  One  of  the  greatest  of  all  prayers  is 
that  of  Nebuchadnezzar  to  Marduk  on  his  ascension:  "0  eternal 
ruler.  Lord  of  all    .    .    .    lead  the  king  by  the  right  way    .    .    . 

1  am  the  work  of  thy  hand.  Father,  the  great  mercy  which  thou 
showest  to  all,  grant  that  thy  high  majesty,  0  Lord,  may  now  show 
compassion  on  me.  Set  in  my  heart  the  fear  of  thy  Godhead.  Grant 
me  what  thou  deemest  best,  for  thou  it  is  that  hast  created  my  life." 
Another  king  prays  for  his  first-born  that  he  may  commit  no  sin,  and 
another  that  he  may  reign  "according  to  thy  wish.  Let  me  not  in  my 
pride  lose  true  knowledge  of  thee."  Another  prays:  "Set  righteous- 
ness on  my  lips,  and  grace  in  my  heart."  "Marduk  is  the  God  full  of 
mercy  who  lives  to  quicken  what  is  dead,"  and  Ishtar  is  "the  helper 
of  the  oppressed,  endowed  with  majesty,  who  raisest  the  fallen  and 
exaltest  the  trodden  underfoot."  Some  of  these  prayers  to  Marduk 
rise  to  an  almost  prophetic  loftiness  and  suggest  the  best  of  the  proph- 
ets. In  Egypt  the  idea  of  spells  oppressed  the  soul,  and  both  gods 
and  worshippers  used  them  toward  each  other,  the  latter  sometimes 
with  such  confident  faith  that  the  prayer  seems  nothing  less  than  a 
command.    This  is  especially  seen  in  the  "Book  of  the  Dead,"  over 


JESUS'  ETHICS  AND  PRAYER  495 

whom  entrancing  words  were  used  that  their  souls  might  become  divine. 
Prayer  amulets  and  symbols  were  very  prominent  at  every  stage  of  this 
most  elaborate  of  all  the  cults  of  death.  In  one  case  the  soul  addresses 
Ammon:  "I  am  a  perfect  spirit  among  the  companions  of  Ra,  and  I 
have  gone  in  and  come  forth  among  the  perfect  souls;  grant  unto  me 
the  things  which  my  body  needeth  and  heaven  for  my  soul  and  a  hidden 
space  for  my  mummy."  Everywhere  here  we  find  magic  prayer, 
intense  conviction,  trust  in  pictures,  words  of  power,  and  sacred  texts. 

In  Christianity  Clement  developed  the  first  theory  of  prayer. 
The  true  gnostic,  he  says,  "works  himself  with  God  in  his  prayer  so  as 
to  attain  perfection. ' '  Thus  prayer  is  not  merely  petitionary,  but  a  self 
projection.  So  Origen  thought  prayer  was  chiefly  communion.  Still 
the  gnostics  used  the  old  magic  often  suggesting  the  mimetic  acts  of 
lower  faiths  in  their  ritual  under  new  names,  such  as  prayer,  blessing 
the  baptismal  water  on  the  eve  of  Epiphany,  with  thrice  dipping  of  the 
crucifix  into  it,  symboUc  of  the  sweetening  of  the  bitter  water  with 
wood,  in  Exodus.  Some  of  the  formulae  of  the  Church  are  masterpieces 
of  synthesis  of  intoned  chant  with  the  subtle  value  of  suggestion  and  a 
typical  act  with  prayer.  But  we  must  not  forget  that  it  was  the  belief 
in  demons,  possession,  and  exorcism  that  sustained  the  spell  theory  of 
prayer  in  the  early  Christian  ages.  Indeed,  it  has  so  strong  a  hold  that 
I  know  of  no  suggested  reforms  of  Uturgy  that  would  entirely  eliminate 
it. 

We  now  often  regard  prayer  as  an  end  in  itself  rather  than  as  a 
means.  It  is  a  function  of  adjustment  to  fate  or  fortune,  often  seeking 
to  make  the  best  out  of  the  worst.  The  extreme  expression  of  this 
attitude  is  that,  although  the  Lord  slay  and  doom  him  to  hell,  the  saint 
will  acquiesce,  justify  the  divine  way,  and  strive  to  accept  even  fhis 
fate  with  consolation  if  not  with  joy.  This  of  course  assumes  that 
all  evil  is  partial  good,  and  involves  a  struggle  up  to  an  absolute  stand- 
point. Renunciation  has  its  own  inspiration,  and  is  the  ambivalent 
opposite  of  the  Titanism  that  when  brought  to  bay  defies  heaven  and 
dies  with  malediction.  Indeed  destiny  is  a  divine  will  to  which  ours 
must  give  way,  and  this  element  of  prayer  is  all  acquiescence  and  seeks 
to  regard  e\n\  as  purification,  which  is  more  complete  the  hotter  the 
furnace  of  tribulation.  One  function  of  philosophy  is  to  bring  us  to 
abandon  freely  even  the  life  that  fate  will  one  day  require  of  us.  This 
involves,  not  merely  facing  death  with  equanimity  and  dignity,  but  a 


496  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

sense  that  nothing  happens  without  suflScient  reason,  and  that  our 
extinction  would  be  tolerable  if  it  advanced  the  glory  of  God.  The 
race  is  of  course  the  end  to  which  the  individual  is  utterly  subordinated, 
and  so  the  race  itself  may  be  a  means  to  be  subordinated  to  a  higher 
end,  and  that  to  a  still  higher  one  in  indefinite  perspective.  Thus 
there  is  not  only  a  joy  but  a  passion  in  utter  self-sacrifice  and  immola- 
tion. 

Prayer  psychologically  considered  does  not  presuppose  invocation 
or  any  special  concept  of  any  being  to  whom  the  prayer  is  addressed, 
so  that  an  agnostic  or  atheist  can  truly  pray.  "O  God,  if  there  is  a 
God,  save  my  soul,  if  I  have  a  soul,"  is  a  real  prayer.  True  prayer,  too, 
may  be  addressed  to  stalks,  stones,  trees,  and  idols,  sun,  moon,  stars, 
ether;  and  it  would  be  easy  to  quote  genuine  cases  of  it  to  about  every 
false  deity  the  world  has  ever  known.  The  savage  who  conceives 
things  below  man  and  prays  downward,  as  we  think,  never  does  so 
according  to  his  own  idea.  Anything,  indeed,  may  be  a  medium 
through  which  man  reaches  the  great  heart  of  the  world,  and  while  the 
new  convert  may  see  God  alike  in  all  things,  the  soul  generally  makes 
a  very  distinct  Objekt-Wahl,  and  through  this  seeks  confidential  con- 
verse, dialogue,  or  to  make  incursions  into  a  higher  realm,  or  to  receive 
visitations  from  it.  Thus  the  culmination  of  prayer  is  psychologically 
very  analogous  in  the  moral  sphere  to  the  hedonic  narcosis  that  Scho- 
penhauer ascribes  to  the  moment  of  most  intense  aesthetic  contempla- 
tion with  surcease  of  all  pain.  This  is  why  mystic  prayer  is  sometimes 
so  regenerating.  "  He  prays  best  who  loves  best,"  and  the  acme  of  the 
communion  of  love  is  a  transport  which  usually  leaves  the  soul  perma- 
nently changed  because  it  has  been  caught  up  by  the  oversoul  and 
received  a  higher  potentialization.  The  soul  has  reopened  the  original 
well-spring  of  life  and  perhaps  glimpsed  its  own  final  destiny,  augmented 
every  higher  motivation.  This  makes  prayer  in  a  sense  the  opener  of 
new  and  higher  ways,  the  purest  psychic  expression  of  the  evolutionary 
push-up  in  us.  Moozumdar  once  told  me  how  he  insisted  on  a  cupola 
on  his  Bombay  College,  in  which.  Christian  though  he  was,  he  encour- 
aged his  students  to  develop  the  old  Buddhistic  cult  of  sitting  cross- 
legged  alone,  high  above  the  earth,  in  quiet,  turning  the  soul  inward, 
trying  to  escape  from  the  great  fatigue,  watching  the  greater  stars 
come  out  in  the  inner  Hfe  as  the  garish  little  sun  of  consciousness  set. 
His  idea  was  not  so  much  to  evacuate  the  mind  in  the  contemplation 


JESUS'  ETHICS  AND  PRAYER  497 

of  Nirvana  as  to  reinforce  it  by  attaining  perfect  nervous  poise  and 
repose  as  a  kind  of  higher  rest  cure.  Or  rather  the  goal  was  to  hear  the 
still,  small  voice  of  man's  truest  nature,  to  develop  some  consciousness 
of  our  higher,  more  perfect  and  generic  self,  which  he  deemed  the  true 
vocation  of  man,  which  consisted  in  communing  with  and  drawing  out 
his  own  genius,  and  feeling  its  incubation.  Western  thought  has 
often  recognized,  though  in  a  far  fainter  way,  this  higher  autodidactic 
element  in  the  soul.  Indeed,  in  a  sense,  not  only  the  mystic  contempla- 
tion striving  to  reach  the  superessential,  but  even  the  scientific  bot- 
toming on  some  absolute  space,  ether,  energy;  Kant's  autonomous 
oughtness,  supreme  over  every  heteronomous  motive;  Schleiermacher's 
feeling  of  absolute  dependence,  which  will  always  be  correlated  with 
Hegel's  idea  of  absolute  freedom;  the  passionate  Edwardsian  love  of 
being;  the  love  which  for  Jesus  and  Paul  is  the  fulfilling  of  the  law — 
these,  and  indeed  all  the  higher  impulsions  of  the  soul,  down  through 
the  whole  history  of  the  categories,  testify  that  man  has  experienced 
something  in  his  own  nature  that  is  authoritative,  unfallen,  capable  of 
being  normative  in  his  life.  Man  cannot  work  out  these  themes  in  the 
form  of  personal  vital  experience  without  being  devout.  They  are  the 
permanent  and  essential  parts  of  his  higher  nature,  and  the  act  of 
bringing  them  out  is,  in  its  most  generic  aspect,  prayer.  They  are  the 
best  things  in  us,  and  perhaps  the  very  hardest  to  get  at  because  they 
are  elements  of  our  very  personality.  They  give  all  the  worth  there 
is  to  every  proof  of  immortality,  and  we  might  well  abase  ourselves 
before  them,  as  if  they  were  not  parts  of  us  but  of  God  incarnate  in  us. 
Here  it  is  that  we  live  in  him  and  he  in  us.  Indeed,  if  man  does  not 
become  one  with  the  eternal  in  this  realm  of  inner  unity  of  intuitions, 
feelings  and  desires,  he  remains  forever  separated  from  it  in  all  the 
derived  unities  of  consciousness. 

One  function  of  prayer  is  praise,  which  may  lapse  to  adulation 
and  flattery,  with  which  the  Orient  particularly  exalts  the  amour 
propre  of  potentates.  We  enumerate  the  physical,  metaphysical,  moral 
attributes  of  the  great  Autos  with  abandon  and  superlativeness,  eulo- 
gizing him  with  endless  panegyrics  for  his  great  achievements  in  the 
past.  We  invoke  him  as  over  all  lords,  kings,  rulers,  with  a  kind  of 
poetic  license  not  unmixed  with  a  consciousness  that  praise  is  the  best 
exordium  for  requests.  True  praise  involves  a  profound  sense  of 
sublimity,  which  is  perhaps  the  best  expander  of  the  soul,  even  inspiring 


498  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

creation  in  the  sense  of  Ruskin,  who  insists  that  "all  art  is  praise." 
In  this  direction,  at  least,  lie  some  of  the  loftiest  human  thoughts  and 
feeUngs.  The  vast  modern  enlargement  of  the  universe  greatly  en- 
hances this  attitude  toward  the  divine,  so  that  of  him  who  best  knows 
philosophy  and  science  it  can  be  said,  as  it  was  long  ago  of  the 
astronomer,  that  if  undevout  he  is  mad.  The  vastation  of  knowledge 
broadened  with  progress  of  the  suns  is  a  growing  incitement  to  this  de- 
votional attitude  and  tends  to  bring  man  metaphorically  to  his  knees. 
At  an  age  when  the  spirit  of  criticism  tends  to  paralyze  the  higher 
powers  of  appreciation,  when  men  are  prone  to  take  greater  pleasure 
in  looking  down  than  in  looking  up,  and  the  instinct  of  reverence  lan- 
guishes, this  element  of  praise  ought  to  be  a  theme  of  careful  psycho- 
pedagogic  study  and  ought  to  be  developed,  for  its  cult  is  capable  of  a 
far  greater  function  and  value  than  it  has  ever  had  in  giving  man  the 
new  orientation  he  still  lacks  to  the  new  world  of  science. 

The  most  important  element  in  prayer  psychologically  considered 
is  confession.  The  instinct  to  tell  instead  of  to  conceal  our  faults 
is  sometimes  very  strong,  so  that  relatives  and  lawyers  may  have  to 
contend  against  this  impulse  in  cUents  they  are  defending,  and  suicide 
is  sometimes  a  form  of  confession.  So  social  is  man  that  both  his  sins 
and  troubles  seem  halved  by  sharing  them  with  a  confidant.  In  some 
temperaments  the  impulse  to  confess  even  sins  that  may  bring  legal 
penalties  and  ostracism  or  that  excite  feelings  of  repulsion,  all  of  which 
silence  might  escape,  is  so  sudden  that  it  might  be  called  spasmodic. 
It  may  be  prompted  by  a  sense  of  danger  so  intolerable  that  even  the 
worst  social  penalty  is  voluntarily  incurred  in  order  to  reUeve  the 
psychic  tension,  just  as  men  often  have  such  horror  of  altitudes  that 
they  throw  themselves  down  from  heights.  I  have  often  been  tempted 
to  coin  a  word,  poinetropia  (/>(7iw«  =  penalty),  to  express  the  fascination 
that  punishments  for  real  faults  may  sometimes  have.  Plato  thought 
that  bad  men  in  their  hearts  hungered  for  the  retribution  due  their 
evil  deeds;  and  in  the  annals  of  crime,  and  sometimes  in  common  life,  we 
certainly  meet  this  impulsion,  rare  and  overlaid  as  it  usually  is  by  the 
selfish  instincts  of  escaping  pain  generally,  and  also  by  the  Christian 
habit  of  regarding  the  atonement  as  superseding  the  reign  of  justice  in 
the  world.  If  in  error,  admit;  if  in  fault,  tell  it  frankly,  whether  to  the 
person  injured,  physician,  priest,  friend,  or  God,  for  this  is  the  true 
way  of  honour,  chivalry,  manhood,  and  brings  great  and  instant  ease- 


JESUS'  ETHICS  AND  PRAYER  499 

ment.  Confession  shows  good  intentions  to  be  deeper  than  our  faults, 
and  as  in  some  sense  sloughing  o£F  the  latter  as  an  alien  and  not  our 
true  self.  Moreover,  confession  lets  in  the  light  of  another's  knowledge 
upon  propensities  that  can  flourish  only  in  the  darkness  of  conceahnent. 
It  is  reparation  and  balm  for  wounds  that  we  inflict.  We  must  chiefly 
remember,  moreover,  that  the  lie  came  into  the  world  to  cloak  sin,  and 
this  is  still  its  chief  motive.  No  one  lies  to  conceal  virtue,  but  the 
first  and  worst  lies  are  to  veil  wrongdoing.^  Heinroth,  the  Berlin 
aUenist,  conceived  all  disease,  insanity  and  sin  included,  as  Hes, 
because  perversion  of  nature's  intent  in  us;  and  Nordau  and  many 
others  (for  this  topic  has  now  a  copious  Hterature)  have  shown  how 
deep-seated  mendacity  is  in  the  conventions  of  modern  society.  Thus 
when  an  individual  or  a  civilization  gives  up  the  He  and  falls  back  upon 
the  real  self  by  robustly  speaking,  thinking,  acting  the  truth  and  wish- 
ing to  be  accepted  for  what  it  really  is  by  nature  and  heredity,  a  joy 
and  peace  so  great  that  it  is  often  well  called  regeneration  supervenes. 
Thus  sins  and  Hes  have  the  same  root;  or,  in  theological  phrase,  the 
same  Diabolus,  as  their  father.  The  worst  result  is  when  men  come  to 
believe  their  own  lies,  as  they  always  tend  to  do,  and  when  lies  work 
themselves  into  the  soul  and  remain  unassimilated  like  surds  or  foreign 
bodies,  vitiating  the  roots  of  character.  To  some  morbid  souls  there 
comes  a  strange  exhilaration  in  the  blankest  kind  of  lying,  insisting 
that  white  is  black  when  gazing  upon  it.  This  gives  a  sense  of  emanci- 
pation from  reality,  asserts  the  sovereignty  of  arbitrariness,  and  makes 
conscience  conscious.  To  say  the  thing  that  is  not,  and  deny  the 
thing  that  is,  seem  inspiration  for  some  moral  inverts.  This  pseudo- 
mania  to  lie  where  the  truth  would  better  serve  one's  purpose,  as  great 
souls  sacrifice  for  the  truth,  brings  out  a  kind  of  self-consciousness  that 
might  be  called  mental  masturbation.  Of  course,  too,  men  have 
prayed  to  and  devoted  their  lives  to  the  powers  of  evil,  and  there  have 
been  those  who  strove  deliberately  to  commit  every  known  sin,  as  the 
history  of  Antichrist  and  Satanism  shows.  But  we  should  not  forget 
that  practicaUy  aU  devils  are  ex,  faUen,  or  emeritus  gods  that  have 
been  dethroned,  and  conversely  that  the  best  gods  are  devils  many 
times  refined  and  reformed  and  the  highest  in  a  series  of  many  sub- 
stitutions, and  that  it  is  a  psychic  trait  of  man,  as  his  elimination  of 
the  missing  Hnk  has  shown,  to  abhor  the  second  best  more  than  he  does 

.      >See my  "Children's  Lies,"  Pctf.5«m.,  Vol.  I,  p.  txi.    Also  Delbrttck:  "Die  psychologlscheLage."  .Stuttgart,  iSqi. 


SCO  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

the  fifth  or  tenth  best.  If  prayer  is  real  truth  in  word  and  deed,  it 
always  involves  contrition  (or  literally  trituration)  of  self  and  of  pride, 
which  are  the  roots  of  sin  and  lies.  For  if  they  are  not  expurgated  the 
soul  is  dualized.  If  confession  to  one  halves,  confession  to  many,  which 
is  harder,  still  more  diminishes  guilt,  especially  if  voluntary.  Auricular 
confession  in  the  Catholic  Church  meets  a  great  need  for  which  Prot- 
estantism has  no  adequate  substitute.  Priestly  confidence  is  inviolate 
and  respected  even  by  Courts  in  cases  of  the  greatest  crimes.  It  may, 
of  course,  be  abused  or  become  mechanical,  perfunctory,  or  too  insti- 
tutionalized. But  if  genuine  and  contrite  it  is  its  own  absolution. 
In  Dostoyefsky's  "Crime  and  Punishment"  the  detective  long  had 
proof  enough  to  convict  the  criminal,  but  worked  to  bring  about  his 
full  confession,  feeling  that  this  should  be  the  goal  of  every  detective. 
The  ancient  Jews  and  Teutons  were  too  proud  to  confess  to  any  but 
God,  but  the  more  social  Southern  races  have  long  found  peace  in 
confessing  to  accredited  men.  Disclosures  to  God  are  secret,  the 
difficulty  of  avowal  is  lessened,  and  there  is  Httle  virtue  in  being  honest 
to  the  omniscient  Searcher  of  hearts.  But  if  we  consider  confession 
for  what  it  truly  is,  viz.,  deepening  self-knowledge,  it  may  be  in  itself 
the  best  autotherapy.  Round  terms  or  mere  enumerations  are  not 
enough,  but  poignancy  of  regret  and  improvement  can  come  only  with 
specification.  Of  course  the  devotee  who  babbles  to  God  that  he  is  a 
vile  wretch,  polluted  with  sin,  if  taken  literally  would  be  expelled  from 
Church,  placed  under  a  social  ban,  boycotted  or  outlawed.  This  kind 
of  confession  is  a  mere  parody  of  the  real  thing,  but  even  this  seems  to 
have  for  some  its  charm,  because  many  have  confessed  to  sins  they 
never  committed  and  had  almost  a  mania  for  magnifying  those  they 
had.  This,  however,  is  easily  explainable.  Hystericals  gratify  their 
instinct  to  be  interesting  by  inventing  heinous  offences  with  a  prodi- 
gality of  fancy  and  detail  that  misleads  adepts.  Feeling  that  they  have 
done  wrong  beyond  the  possibility  of  complete  and  exhaustive  acknowl- 
edgment, they  magnify  the  errors  they  recall,  so  that  the  sum  of  sin 
may  be  sure  to  be  offset  by  the  equivalent  amount  of  confession.  In 
other  words,  they  make  the  bad  they  remember  worse  than  it  is  to 
cancel  forgotten  and  unconfessed  faults,  the  former  in  technical  terms 
being  overcharged  with  affectivity.  Of  course  brooding  distorts  true 
proportions,  while  sometimes  the  sin  is  felt  to  be  so  deep-seated  that 
conviilsive  efforts  are  necessary  to  exteriorize  it.    Some,  too,  become 


JESUS'  ETHICS  AND  PRAYER  501 

habitual  inebriates  of  the  sense  of  reKef  that  telling  brings,  so  tJiat  they 
appropriate  and  disgorge  every  sin  they  hear  of.  In  Jeremy  Taylor's 
"Ductor  Dubitantium,"  in  the  records  of  the  old  Fulton  Street  daily 
prayer  meeting,  which  I  once  perused,  and  in  all  the  literature  of 
casuistry  and  autobiographies  of  great  saints  and  great  sinners,  one 
finds  copious  illustrations  of  all  these  abnormahties,  every  one  of  which 
now  has  its  close  analogue  in  the  literature  of  personal  hygiene  and 
autotherapy. 

Remarkable  new  light,  which  has  shown  confession  to  be  one  of  the 
central  themes  of  humanistic  impulse,  has  lately  been  thrown  on  it 
in  the  recent  development  of  abnormal  psychology',  especially  in  the 
line  begun  by  Breuer  and  Freud, ^  the  pith  of  which  is  as  follows: 
When  a  nervous  system  is  a  little  loosened  in  its  texture,  as  in  puberty, 
or  by  reason  of  hereditary  defect,  exhaustion,  or  some  sudden  or  un- 
usual experience,  death,  accident,  or  sin,  the  tension  thus  caused  often 
becomes  too  great  to  be  worked  off  by  the  laws  of  associative  thinking, 
the  function  of  which  is  to  adjust  to  and  assimilate  the  new  fact,  pain- 
ful though  it  is.  It  cannot  be  expressed  by  normal  actions,  reflexes, 
gestures,  or  words.  In  such  a  case  the  generated  excitement  over- 
flows, diffuses,  and  tends  to  find  or  break  out  new  paths.  It  now  be- 
comes a  question  of  lines  of  least  resistance,  as  in  the  nasal  irritation 
that  normally  issues  in  a  sneeze,  when,  if  the  latter  is  delayed  the 
excitement  irradiates  to  eyes,  brain,  glands,  respiration,  etc.,  or  as  a 
riddle  may  excite  great  tension  until  the  answer  is  found.  Goethe 
felt  psychic  pain  after  very  strong  feeHng  till  he  had  expressed  it  in 
poetry.  In  weakened  subjects  this  vent  for  psychic  excitement  may 
be  found  in  digestive  or  circulatory  pains  or  convulsions,  in  tonic  or 
clonic  cramps,  etc.,  till  one  or  more  of  these,  although  abnormal, 
become  habitual.  When  thus  these  exciting  causes  become  real 
psychic  traumata,  when  they  break  out  in  these  unnatural  Hues,  when 
ideogenic  causes  thus  issue  in  somatic  symptoms,  the  latter  physical 
phenomena  take  the  place  of  consciousness,  which  may  be  quite  lost 
with  hardly  any  accessible  trace.  Perhaps,  e.  g.,  a  series  of  cramps  or 
digestive  disturbances,  started  by  a  painful  psychic  experience,  draws 
off  the  energy  so  completely  that  the  experience  itself  is  entirely  for- 
gotten. Now,  when  in  such  cases  the  memory  of  the  cause  and  all  its 
attendant  circumstances  can  be  brought  point  by  point  and  vividly  into 

»"Studien  Uber  Hysteric."    Leipzig,  1805. 


502  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

consciousness,  whether  by  question,  suggestion,  or  hypnotism,  and 
everything  can  be  vividly  reproduced  with  the  attendant  feelings  and 
movements,  and  thus  the  psychic  reaction  be  dramatically  restored, 
then  the  abnormal  symptom  vanishes  because  its  surrogate  has  been 
restored  in  consciousness.  This  "auricular  confession,"  as  these 
authors  term  it,  plucks  out  the  cause  of  the  disorder  which  had  acted  as 
a  foreign  body  in  the  soul,  so  that  its  functions  are  "converted"  back 
to  normality.  Such  patients  suffer  from  "forgotten  reminiscence," 
which  is  exorcised  by  this  process.  So  in  the  larger  racial  field  Mansoul 
has  been  scarred  by  the  long  and  bitter  struggle  of  survival.  Not  only 
is  the  soul  warped  but  the  system  has  experienced  washouts  of 
passion  that  have  broken  through  dams  of  restraint  and  gullied  the 
psychophysic  organism  with  many  a  lesion.  Sense,  appetite,  sex, 
disease,  have  left  their  marks  upon  him.  Storms  of  anger  have  howled 
through  his  nature,  so  that  both  his  conscious  and  unconscious  hfe 
have  been  perverted.  Psychic  pestilence  and  contagion,  like  greed, 
drink,  war,  witchcraft,  fetishism,  fanaticism,  have  left  some  of  his 
nervous  functions  more  or  less  insane,  so  that  his  organism  is  a  reso- 
nance chamber  of  the  long  historic  travail  to  escape  the  ape  and  tiger 
in  him,  to  get  loose  of  Plato's  dark  steed  harnessed  to  the  white  one,  or 
of  the  body  of  death  predisposed  to  leipothumia.  At  various  points 
we  have  reacted  wrongly  to  our  environment.  Not  only  our  world 
but  our  experience  has  grown  vastly  too  large  for  our  intelligence  to 
respond  to  it  aright. 

But  deep  as  is  the  depravity,  it  is  not  total,  or  man's  case  would  be 
hopeless.  There  is  always  a  saving  remnant  of  good.  Fortunately 
not  only  the  worst  individuals  but  the  worst  elements  of  man's  nature 
have  been  eUminated,  and  the  best  carefully  preserved.  Bad  as  man 
is  to-day,  he  has  unquestionably  been  vastly  worse  in  the  past,  so  that 
the  sense  of  personal  and  ancestral  sin  that  has  always  been  so  strong 
has  never  been  without  hope  of  restoration.  Thus  the  religious  con- 
ception of  Jesus'  suffering  is  more  or  less  reflected  in  the  depths  of  the 
soul  where  slumber  the  almost  effaced  and  deeply  overlaid  traces  of  the 
goodness  of  man's  first "  intention."  The  first  stage  of  cure  and  rescue, 
then,  is  the  Aristotelian  katharsis  that  comes  by  inner  rehearsal  of  the 
fall,  the  re-experience  in  weakened,  imaginary  form  of  the  pride,  anger, 
lust,  that  seem  to  have  done  their  worst  for  us  in  order  to  arouse  the 
higher  powers  that  control  and  correct  them.    Nelson  long  ago  showed 


JESUS'  ETHICS  AND  PRAYER  503 

how  habitual  forms  of  bad  dreams  and  nightmares  might  be  prevented 
by  rehearsing  them  in  thought  faintly  just  before  going  to  sleep.  So  the 
soul  may  acquire  a  certain  immunity  from  temptation  by  reenacting 
its  drama  on  the  mimic  shadow  stage  of  consciousness  and  thus  robbing 
it  of  its  sting  of  actual  sin.  How  deep  this  realization  of  the  perversity 
of  our  conduct  and  nature  can  go  is  an  individual  matter.  Some  can 
feel  guilty  only  for  a  few  overt  acts  in  their  lives,  and  very  few  can 
realize  the  ravages  of  our  remote  inheritance.  To  do  this  we  need  to 
have  some  conception  of  ideally  perfect  human  nature,  and  only  the 
embodiment  of  this  could  adequately  feel  the  full  weight  of  sin  or  realize 
the  degree  of  man's  ahenation  from  his  norm.  Of  course,  conviction  of 
unworthiness  and  admission  of  it  even  to  self  means  that  schism  has 
begun  and  that  purgation  may  follow.  The  bad  is  set  clearly  over 
against  the  good,  and  resonances  of  "vague  snatches  of  Uranian  anti- 
phone  "  begin  to  be  felt.  A  tribunal  is  erected ;  the  soul  is  judging  with 
all  its  might  and  main.  The  law  written  in  the  heart  is  revived,  for 
man  is  confessing  to  himself  and  the  moult  of  his  baser  nature  is  be- 
ginning. This  is  the  most  inner  and  intimate  of  all  the  functions  of 
prayer,  the  most  saving  of  all  works,  the  greatest  of  all  rescues.  It 
implies  the  highest  vitality  and  momentum  of  further  development. 
Indeed,  it  suggests  to  us  that  the  chief  function  of  self-consciousness  is 
remedial  because  its  very  existence  is  due  to  our  deviation  from  the 
true  law  of  our  own  being.  Thus  the  fall  of  man  was  from  instinct  and 
intuition  to  self-consciousness,  which  is  like  a  wart  made  on  a  tree  by 
the  sting  of  an  insect,  except  that  when  the  end  of  perfection  is  at- 
tained it  may  be  eHminated.^  Recent  writers  have  urged  in  a  very 
sentimental  way  that  man  learned  to  speak  in  order  to  pray,  and  that 
as  his  language  is  the  cry  of  the  body,  his  prayer  is  that  of  his  soul. 
It  is  inner  speech  "exciting  our  emotions."  Strange  as  this  is,  we 
know  that  often  abnormal  functions  tend  to  come  to  the  front,  and 
that  as  long  as  functions  are  undisturbed  we  are  not  conscious  of  them, 
so  that  to  sense  them  is  a  danger  signal  which  not  only  calls  attention 
to  where  help  is  needed,  but  on  the  principle  ubi  effluxus  ibi  affluxiis 
is  itself  of  real  therapeutic  value.  The  conscious  intellect,  therefore, 
may  have  its  prime  function  in  making  distinctions  between  right  and 
wrong  ways  of  thinking  and  acting,  so  that  it  is  at  bottom  therapeutic 


>Guiniara6ns:  "Le  Besoln  de  Prier  et  ses  Conditions  Psychologiques."    Rev  Philos.,  Oct ,  190a. 
A.  Strindberg:  "La  Psychologic  de  la  PriSre."    Rev.  Bhixhe,  Apr.  15  and  May  i,  1895. 


S04  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

and  curative.  This  gives  us  our  deepest  view  of  the  confessional  ele- 
ment in  prayer.  To  tell  the  Great  Companion,  or  an  idle  spectator, 
or  a  human  confidant,  is  itself  a  way  of  salvation.  To  acknowledge 
is  not  only  to  objectify  but  to  heterize.  Confession  is  thus  truly 
apotropaic,  and  this  was  the  goal  of  all  primitive,  if  not  of  every  other 
kind  of  sacrifice.  What  is  thus  aHenated  ceases  to  be  part  of  us,  is 
already  partitioned  off  from  us,  and  this  is  the  psychic  root  of  pardon. 
Only  the  sin  that  is  thus  exteriorized  or  doomed  to  exclusion  is  forgotten 
because  only  this  reveals  the  higher  self  which  is  foreign  to  it.  It  must 
still  be  punished  in  the  body,  or  even  in  the  mind,  of  the  individual; 
but  something  higher  now  stands  forth  that  had  no  participation  in 
its  commital,  and  is  therefore  itself  exempt  from  either  guilt  or  penalty. 
The  exuviae  may  still  cling  to  us,  and  we  suffer  pain;  but  the  other  purer, 
more  interior  part  of  us,  remains  pure.  Thus  confession  becomes,  as 
Hegel  in  his  "Phenomenology"  says,  the  act  of  sovereignty  of  the  soul 
by  which  it  forgives  itself  because  it  has  no  longer  any  part  or  lot  in 
the  punishment  that  may  supervene. 

Prayer,  in  the  modern  psychological  sense  of  meditation  and  self- 
communion  in  quiet  hours,  when  we  inventory  our  interests,  powers 
and  ideals,  and  commune  with  the  deeper  racial  self  within  us,  is  a  cult 
that  greatly  needs  and,  indeed,  is  now  to  some  extent  having  a  revival. 
In  the  prayer  books  of  the  Church,  and  lately  in  many  new  prayers 
composed  for  those  in  various  callings  and  for  those  facing  special 
exigencies  or  choices,  and  more  specifically  in  the  prayers  composed  for 
soldiers  in  the  field,  we  reahze  again  the  pregnant  sense  in  which  man  is 
a  praying  animal.  Prayer  should  keep  alive  the  aspirations  of  youth, 
so  many  of  which  are  prone  to  fade  as  we  advance  in  life.  It  should 
refine  but  never  destroy  them,  for  it  is  one  of  the  chief  strongholds  of 
ideality,  and  rightly  used  gives  the  truest  and  most  practical  self- 
knowledge  and  self-control.  WTien  collective,  it  makes  a  unique 
synthesis  between  members  of  a  social  whole,  and  when  soHtary,  as  it 
should  also  always  be  at  times,  it  brings  and  keeps  us  in  touch  with  the 
submerged  self  within  us  and  taps  its  measureless  resources.  Of  all 
autodidactic  agencies  it  is  perhaps  thus  the  most  synthetic  and  unifying, 
bringing  together  feeling,  will,  and  intellect,  the  conscious  and  the 
unconscious,  the  individual  and  his  social  environment.  Nature 
lovers,  artists,  and  also  quite  notably  children,  have  evolved  special 
formal  prayers  in  both  prose  and  poetry  to  express  for  them  what  are 


JESUS'  ETHICS  AND  PRAYER  505 

ideal  attitudes,  toward  the  aspects  of  nature,  society,  duty,  temptations, 
studies,  vocations,  etc.  Sometimes  individuals  develop  a  personal 
mark,  sign,  or  symbol,  book-plate,  bit  of  art  or  diagram,  incorporating 
into  it  often  the  inmost  secrets  of  their  lives,  which  they  would  not 
impart  to  their  most  intimate  friends.  This  is  really  a  prayer,  for  it 
expresses  their  most  ardent  wishes.  At  the  opposite  extreme  of  gen- 
erality stands,  of  course,  the  immortal  petition  of  Our  Lord,  which  is 
so  perfect  that  in  all  its  history  I  find  but  few  improvements  have  even 
been  suggested  as  possible.  The  chief  of  these  has  been  repeatedly 
expressed  in  the  wish  that  to  the  petition  "Deliver  us  from  evil"  he 
might  have  added  "and  ignorance,"  so  that  the  advance  in  knowledge 
and  science  should  have  had  recognition,  for  this  might  have  mitigated 
the  long  conflict  between  piety  and  reason. 

(i)  There  is  no  such  quintessential  synopsis  of  the  Christian  con- 
sciousness in  brief  form  as  is  attained  in  the  Lord's  Prayer,  which  is 
an  outline  of  its  chief  attitudes  toward  the  world  and  is  on  the  whole 
the  high- water  mark  of  the  moral  developmental  instincts  of  the  human 
soul.  To  address  as  "Father"  the  background  of  the  universe,  its  source, 
principle,  the  unknown  reservoir  out  of  which  all  things  sprang,  be 
it  ether,  energy,  or  something  forever  above  all  name  or  thought, 
marked  a  flash  of  creative  genius  or  an  inspiration  richer  in  anticipa- 
tions and  more  transforming  in  its  beneficent  influences  than  perhaps 
any  other  single  conception  of  the  religious  soul.  If  man's  pedigree 
is  now  conceived  to  go  back  through  the  amoeba  to  some  matrix, 
mother-lye  or  cosmic  gas,  it  is,  nevertheless,  to  a  father,  and  the  stages 
of  our  evolution  are  all  procreative.  Creation  is  an  act  of  generation 
by  which  the  great  One  and  All  transmits  his  own  inmost  essence  to 
the  world.  He  is  here  personated,  and  we  are  connected  not  only  with 
his  somatic  but  with  his  yet  more  fundamental  spermatic  elements. 
Just  so  far  as  we  are  true  and  legitimate  children,  therefore,  we,  too, 
are  divine  in  the  same  sense  that  he  is,  and  if  nature  in  its  most  compre- 
hensive sense  is  the  total  product  of  all  his  creativeness,  it  is  no  less 
divine  than  he.  Otherwise,  generative  stages  are  degenerate  and 
decadent.  The  offspring  is  not  equal  to  the  parent,  or  all  Godhood 
is  not  expressed  in  creation  or  revealed  in  mind  and  its  products. 
Indeed,  this  mode  of  address  seems  at  first  a  product  of  Titanic  over- 
weaning,  heaven-storming  pride,  which  to  the  Greek  would  rouse  divine 
jealousy  and  invite  wrath.    The  emphasis  here,  however,  is  more  upon 


5o6  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

beneficence,  present  guidance,  and  parental  care,  so  that  our  attitude 
in  thus  addressing  the  Source  of  all  things  is  that  of  a  child  in  frank 
relations  to  an  all-powerful  parent,  abounding  in  love  and  incUned  to 
answer  all  reasonable  petitions.  Pindar  devoted  his  great  genius  in 
part  to  tracing  back  the  pedigree  of  the  successful  athletes  at  Olympia 
to  the  heroes  of  an  older  day,  Apollo,  Hercules,  and  other  deities  of  the 
Greek  Pantheon.  But  by  the  appellation  "father"  the  Christian  de- 
clares that  the  heavenly  ichor  of  the  only  living  and  true  God  flows 
in  his  own  veins  by  direct,  literal,  linear  heredity,  and  this  conscious- 
ness therefore  fortifies  and  emboldens  all  his  petitions.  Indeed,  this 
is  the  greatest  altitude  which  the  soul  reaches  in  its  animistic,  an- 
thropomorphizing impulse  to  construe  the  universe  into  congruence 
with  man's  highest  possible  conception  of  himself.  Evolution  cannot 
be  conceived  or  represented  in  a  more  artistic  or  personal  way,  and  far 
as  science  has  now  removed  us  from  the  beginnings  of  creation,  the 
fact  that  creative  evolution  is  here  represented,  not  as  a  fiat  or  an 
act  of  mechanical  construction  but  as  the  most  intimate  projection 
of  self,  should  make  man  feel  henceforth  forever  at  home  in  his  world. 
It  is  only  anaemic  sentiment  that  interprets  fatherhood  according  to 
the  degenerate  ways  often  seen  in  contemporary  addresses  to  God, 
which  often  show  traces  of  sentimentality,  querulousness,  over-intimacy, 
the  famiharity  born  of  imperfect  respect,  or  the  assumption  that  love 
means  indulgence  of  whims  until  our  attitude  suggests  that  of  spoiled 
children.  Even  if,  as  we  are  now  told,  the  father  complex  in  this  higher 
apphcation  is  fashioned  on  the  human  parent,  this  conception  keeps 
fatherhood  dignified  and  worthy,  and  suggests  to  each  earthly  father 
an  added  motive  so  to  live  and  discharge  his  whole  duty  and  function 
as  head  of  his  household  that  his  children  shall  form  the  largest  and 
highest  possible  ideas  of  him,  so  that  when  they  are  transferred  to  the 
heavenly  All-Father  they  shall  not  be  too  faulty. 

(2)  The  Father  addressed  is  ours  and  not  mine.  This  implies  the 
solidarity  of  the  human  race,  and  might  easily  be  extended  to  imply  that 
of  all  animate  and,  perhaps,  inanimate  existence.  Even  though  we 
pray  alone,  it  is  not  selfish  but  with  initial  recognition  that  it  is  to  a 
God  upon  whom  all  other  creatures  have  the  same  claim  as  we.  Man- 
kind, especially,  is  a  confraternity.  We  are  all  of  one  family,  and  every 
ideal  of  Catholicism  and  universality  lurks  under  this  pronoun.  Its 
connotations  are  in  fact  wide  or  narrow  just  in  proportion  to  the  span 


JESUS'  ETHICS  AND  PRAYER  507 

of  the  horizon  of  our  own  consciousness.  He  is  the  Father  of  even  our 
enemy,  who  would  imprecate  us;  for  he  sends  rain  upon  the  evil  as  well 
as  upon  the  good.  In  fine,  not  only  mutuahty  and  brotherhood,  but 
consubstantiaHty  with  the  entire  world  upon  the  ground  of  genetic 
relationship  to  a  common  source,  are  involved. 

(3)  He  is  in  heaven.  Toward  it,  rather  than  toward  the  rising  sun, 
toward  Mecca,  Jerusalem,  Benares,  or  any  altar,  crucifix,  or  shrine,  we 
should  direct  our  prayers.  Man  is  by  the  etymology  of  his  Greek 
name  the  upward-looking  being.  The  erect  position  was  acquired 
after  long  experience  of  anthropoid  ancestors  whose  arboreal  habits 
freed  the  forehmbs  from  the  necessity  of  the  work  of  locomotion,  so 
that  they  could  be  instruments  for  more  intellectual  tasks.  Like  our 
Aryan  ancestors  or  the  classic  statue  of  the  Greek  youth,  we  extend 
our  hands  supine  upward.  We  pray  up  into  the  void  of  space,  we 
look  away  from  the  earth  toward  the  nebulae,  ether,  and  sky,  on  the 
same  principle  that  the  raja-yoga  gazes  at  his  navel  in  passing  into  the 
rapt  state  of  contemplation,  because  it  is  our  origin,  and  because,  like 
all  the  other  worlds  and  all  that  is  in  them,  we  are  in  some  mysterious 
way  secreted  out  of  the  heavens  from  which  still  comes  our  help. 
Indeed,  to  have  a  sense  of  reality  above  us  (which  we  owe  in  no  small 
measure  to  clouds  and  the  fancies  spun  about  them,  and  to  thunder) 
acquires  and  impHes  a  certain  spirituaUzation  of  soul.  For  primitives, 
belief  in  and  reverence  of  powers  above,  so  vividly  felt  in  storms,  are 
akin  to  what  Renan  has  shown  to  be  the  effect  of  such  phenomena  at 
Sinai  upon  the  plain-dwelling  Hebrews,  viz.,  to  make  God  more  actu- 
ally present,  near,  fearful,  etc.  The  Aryan  mind,  too,  has  developed 
more  richly  than  any  other  the  mythology  which  personifies  celestial 
objects  and  phenomena.  More  effective  yet  is  perhaps  the  over- 
whelming sense  of  our  own  Kttleness  and  insignificance,  most  of  aU 
intensified  in  contemplating  the  infinities  of  time  and  space  which 
an  upward  glance  suggests.  Man  is  profoundly  uranotropic.  De- 
voutness,  reverence,  humihty,  which  are  the  distinctive  features  of  the 
rehgious  mind,  culminate  when  our  thoughts  take  this  direction,  and 
find  their  homeward  orientation  to  be  also  heavenward.  Even  more 
than  Kant's  undevout  astronomer,  those  who  contemplate  infinite 
space  without  devout  sentiments  may  be  called  mad. 

(4)  His  name  is  to  be  hallowed.  God  is  thus  above  all  name,  and 
greater  than  anything  that  can  be  called  thought,  even  in  this  scien- 


5o8  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

tific  age.  Our  minds  cannot  apprehend,  and  still  less  comprehend, 
this  vastest  of  all  possible  objects,  too  great,  indeed,  to  be  objectified. 
He  is  the  one  and  all;  the  great  Pan  himself  personified.  But  worship 
requires  some  form,  concept,  or  at  least  a  term  with  some  appellative 
significance  in  it.  God's  name  may  be  the  whole  body  of  science,  a 
system  of  philosophy,  an  evolutionary  cosmogenic  scheme  of  things. 
He,  of  whom  all  nouns  are  but  partial  names,  all  verbs  designations 
of  his  acts,  all  adjectives  of  his  qualities,  should  have  for  each  of  us 
some  symbol  or  thought-form,  or  should  be  brought  home  by  some 
special  type  of  experience  connected  with  some  time  or  space,  or  at 
least  some  word  above  all  others  to  connote  some  and  denote  all  others 
of  his  attributes.  All  high  art,  all  science  and  religion,  which  strive 
to  formulate  ultimates,  are  wrestling,  as  Jacob  did  with  the  angel,  for 
the  revelation  of  a  new  name,  and  names  have  always  had  magic  power. 
Atoms,  vortexes,  monads,  reals,  ether,  vitality,  force,  mind,  reason, 
beauty,  virtue,  truth,  entelechy,  cause,  infinity,  and  all  the  categories 
of  philosophy  which  Trendelenburg  collected,  as  well  as  the  fundamen- 
tal concepts  of  science,  are  part  names  of  our  polynomous  Father  in 
Heaven.  The  prayer  here  is  that  all  these  be  respected  and  recognized 
as  more  or  less  holy.  The  Christian  as  well  as  the  Jewish  consciousness 
has  been  haunted  by  fears  of  blasphemy  as  the  one  unpardonable  sin, 
and  its  awful  prohibition  is  against  every  degree  of  such  an  offence. 
Of  course  the  divine  name  is  not  hallowed  when  men  become  indifferent 
to  or  contemptuous  of  these  higher  strivings  to  close  in  with  ultimate 
reaUty,  the  efforts  of  which  we  must  not  allow  even  pragmatism  to 
interfere  with.  Not  so  much  the  agnostic  who  insists  that  none  of 
these  are  names  of  reahty,  and  that  all  noumenal  existence  eludes  and 
is  forever  beyond  our  ken  and  reach,  nor  the  pessimist  who  declares 
that  what  we  know  of  it  indicates  that  it  is  bad,  malign,  disruptive,  or 
diseased,  is  here  contemplated — but  rather  he  who  has  lost  the  power 
to  respect  those  products  of  human  endeavour  which  are  most  worthy 
of  reverence  because  seeking  best  to  embody  the  divine,  even  if  it  be 
only  an  idol,  an  elaborate  ceremonial  rite,  a  theology,  or  a  fruitful 
scientific  hypothesis.  The  deities  of  other  and  even  savage  faiths, 
too,  should  be  hallowed  just  so  far  as  they  mark  stages  in  this  incessant 
and  weary  quest  of  man  to  understand,  grasp,  and  achieve  some  kind 
of  imity  of  what  to  lower  creatures  seems  the  booming,  incoherent, 
chaotic,  snarl  of  things  that  we  dare  call  a  universe.    The  soul  has 


JESUS'  ETHICS  AND  PRAYER  509 

always  sought  God,  and  all  its  attempts  to  proximate  him  are  not  with- 
out sacredness. 

( 5)  "  Thy  will  be  done  "  is  not  merely  the  invocation  of  a  theocratic 
rule,  but  the  expression  of  an  earnest  wish  that  pure  oughtness  recon- 
struct and  flow  through  every  sphere  of  Hfe  and  mind.  Our  wills  are 
full  of  picae,  whims,  perversity.  They  are  uninstructed  and,  above  all, 
prone  to  be  selfish.  The  divine  will,  of  which  the  really  educated 
conscience  is  so  commonly  thought  to  be  the  best  oracle,  is  here  invoked 
to  irrigate  human  conduct  and  mind  in  all  details  both  of  the  higher  and 
the  lower  vocation  of  man. 

We  should  not  be  absorbed  by  selfishness  or  inclination,  but  all 
our  acts  should  have  not  only  a  supreme  sanction  but  a  supreme  moti- 
vation. This  is  not  adequately  formulated,  even  in  Kant's  lofty  pre- 
cept of  so  acting  that  all  we  do  could  be  made  a  principle  of  universal 
lawgiving.  But  it  rather  means  acting  as  we  should  wish  to  act  if  we 
saw  all  things  in  their  largest  possible  relations,  and  apprehended  all 
the  subtle  conflicts  of  duties  which  casuistry  has  so  tediously  sought  to 
rubricize.  Nor  does  this  imply  only  an  ethical  rigorism  that  requires 
us  to  act  against  desire,  nor  an  exiguous  prying  Puritan  conscience, 
but  it  recognizes  a  diaphoria  or  No  Man's  Land  of  neutral  deeds,  inter- 
mediate between  right  and  wrong.  It  allows  us  to  conceive  that  the 
Great  Author  of  nature  so  organized  it  that  pleasure  is  in  very  many 
things  the  best  of  all  guides,  although,  because  sin  has  entered  this  fallen 
world  that  has  its  cause,  effect,  or  both,  pleasure  now  has  its  limitations 
fixed  by  adamantine  laws.  Thus,  if  we  ever  have  a  complete  evalua- 
tion of  pleasures  by  which  they  can  be  weighed,  measured,  or  graded 
as  high  and  low,  and  the  absolute  value  of  each  determined  with 
reference  to  the  chief  end  of  man,  this  conflict  will  be  eUminated  and  a 
higher  hedonism  become  the  surest  guide  in  aU  issues. 

God's  will  is  benign  if  evolution  is  his  work,  because  in  the  bitter 
struggle  for  existence  the  fittest  and  best  have  survived,  whfle  others 
have  perished,  and  hence  in  human  affairs  it  is  best  expressed  in  those 
acts  and  institutions  that  tend  to  bring  man  to  the  very  fullest  matur- 
ity of  which  he  is  capable.  If  man's  nature  is  on  the  whole  good  and 
true,  then  those  tendencies  that  are  deepest  and  most  universal  are 
modes  of  executing  this  wiU,  and  the  true  nature  of  man  as  distinct 
from  everything  factitious  is  here  desiderated. 

(6)  The  prayer  for  the  Kingdom  expresses  an  idea  that  has 


5IO  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

prompted  philanthropy,  fired  missionary  zeal,  and  inspired  many  an  ef- 
fort by  deeds  and  books  to  reconstruct  society.    The  visible  Church  is 
supposed  to  be  its  representative,  and  the  ideal  Church  or  the  heavenly 
New  Jerusalem  is  its  realization.     Heaven  is  attractive  because  it  is 
conceived  as  a  community  of  moral,  elite  souls  existing  in  relations  to 
one  another  which  realize  every  noble  human  aspiration.    Man  is  a 
social  being,  or,  in  Aristotle's  phrase,  a  poHtical  animal,  and  although 
his  attempts  to  organize  society,  the  records  of  which  almost  constitute 
history,  have  failed  at  many  periods  and  in  many  respects,  the  dream 
of  ideality  was  perhaps  never  more  vivid  and  in  some  aspects  of  it 
more  detailed  than  now.    From  Plato  to  Comte,  Bellamy,  George, 
in  many  a  philanstery  and  social  and  religious  community,  secret 
societies,  sodahties,  clubs,  profit-sharing  and  cooperative  schemes,  to 
say  nothing  of  reform  movements  in  city,  state,  national  government 
or  Church,  we  see  tentatives  toward  the  realization  of  this  item  in  the 
great  petition.    How  can  men  best  five  together  in  such  a  way  that  the 
worst  shall  be  most  effectively  repressed  and  the  best  most  favoured, 
is  a  problem  never  more  pressing  and  never  more  studied  than  now. 
Just  in  proportion  as  sociologists,  economists,  and  pubUcists  can  so 
adjust  business  and  society  until  they  make  a  perfect  placentum  in 
which  man  can  be  brought  to  his  greatest -perfection,  they  are  helping 
to  usher  in  the  Kingdom.    It  will  not  come  suddenly;  and  probably, 
as  the  world  is  more  and  more  united  and  in  rapport^  each  part  with  all 
others,  no  one  place  or  land  will  take  great  precedence.    The  millennial 
state,  if  social  evolution  ever  realizes  it,  "will  not  be  primeval  paradise, 
or  any  clannish  organization  of  gregarious  instincts,  but  it  will  be  world- 
wide.    We  may  sometime  approxunate  it  by  gently  and  wisely  con- 
straining lower  races  to  take  up  the  white  man's  ways;  but  most  truly 
and  surely  will  it  be  reahzed  where  the  instincts  of  each  ethnic  stock 
are  developed  naturally  upon  their  own  foundations.    We  are  already 
beginning  to  see  that  the  secret  of  colonization  and  missionary  work 
is  to  allow  native  races  the  largest  freedom  to  do  their  own  thing  in 
their  own  way,  if  it  does  not  involve  grave  and  irreparable  loss.    The 
statesman  of  the  future,  moreover,  will  deUberately  take  for  his  prob- 
lem, not  the  grafting  of  a  more  highly  domesticated  scion  into  wild 
stock,  but  the  legitimate  development  of  what  is  everywhere,  even  in 
the  lowest  aboriginal  tribes,  found  to  be  already  begun.    In  plainer 
words,  the  ideal  is  this:  when  by  careful  and  all-sided  anthropological 


JESUS'  ETHICS  AND  PRAYER  511 

study  it  has  been  found  out  just  what  the  family,  tribal,  and  other 
organizations  of  primitive  races  really  are,  what  their  myths,  customs, 
rites,  and  beliefs  truly  mean,  it  will  then  have  to  be  very  carefully  con- 
sidered, on  the  basis  of  this  knowledge,  how  most  effectively,  with 
least  loss  either  of  energy  or  of  what  has  already  been  accomphshed, 
the  next  and  then  the  next  higher  step  can  be  taken.  Then  we  shall 
recognize  the  fact  that  what  we  now  call  civilization  is  not  the  only 
one;  but  that  radically  different  civilizations  that  contravene  perhaps 
many  of  our  fundamental  political,  social,  and  even  economic  axioms 
are  possible,  and  that  there  are  perhaps  as  many  undeveloped  cultures 
and  religions  as  there  are  languages  capable  of  further  development, 
some  of  which  may  indeed  ultimately  become  far  higher  than  any  now 
known,  but  which  are  now  simply  arrested  at  some  lower  stage  of  evo- 
lution or  made  retrogressive,  not  so  much  from  any  inherent  defect  of 
the  idea  or  system  but  from  some  accident  of  hygiene,  location,  food, 
or  some  error  of  misconception  of  crucial  factors,  or,  alas,  sometimes 
by  suppression  or  perversion  of  good  things  by  a  stronger  alien  race. 
Real  colonial  statesmanship,  if  it  ever  becomes  broad  enough  to  realize 
this  possibility,  will  be  bringing  in  the  Father's  Kingdom  in  ways  far 
more  effective  than  cataclysmal  reconstruction  upon  a  single  model, 
which  often  means  the  alienation  of  the  best  indigenous  men,  methods, 
and  ideals.  To  attain  the  end  here  sought  we  must  have  a  psychology 
broad  enough  to  be  truly  called  human.  Indeed,  every  believer  in 
evolution  must  realize  that  our  present  civilization,  like  older  ones  that 
have  perished,  may  be  sloughed  off  like  the  cast  of  a  worm  when  the 
butterfly  emerges  from  it.  Nothing  prompts  the  old  man's  visions 
and  the  young  man's  dream  like  these  optimal  possibilities  of  develop- 
ment of  the  superman  in  the  superstate.  The  swan  song  of  senescence 
sometimes  cadences  the  highest  aspirations  of  the  soul,  while  the  ideals 
of  young  men  are  the  best  material  for  prophecy,  so  that  in  them  we 
find  often  what  will  be  written  as  history  half  a  century  later.  Such 
ideals  supplement  the  limitations  of  what  has  already  happened, 
by  the  larger  complement  of  what  will  be  when  history  really  begins. 
The  increasing  purposes  of  God's  will,  which  faith  sees  running  through 
the  ages,  are  often  balked  by  popular  frenzy,  bigotry,  corruption,  and 
there  have  been  stationary  and  retrograde  centuries;  but  man  to-day 
perhaps  has  more  vital  belief  in  the  future  of  progress  than  ever  before, 
whether  on  this  earth  or  in  a  heavenly  Kingdom,  for  both  locations  are 


512  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

efifective  in  the  same  direction.  The  conception  of  the  primitive 
gnostic  sect  was  of  the  preexisting  soul  descending  into  the  body  of  a 
new-born  babe.  Jesus,  too,  was  said  to  have  divested  himself  of 
ideality  to  become  real  on  earth.  Lotze  dreamed  of  a  state  wherein  his 
soul  would  some  time  hold  high  converse  with  Buddha,  Plato,  Mary, 
and  above  all,  Jesus.  Even  if  the  earlier  concepts  of  the  Church  are  un- 
satisfying or  even  unattractive,  we  all  look  forward  to  a  state  of  attain- 
ment, fulfilment,  completion,  where  all  things  and  persons  will  wear 
the  aureole  of  the  ideal.  Dreams  of  Elysian  conditions  or  of  the 
Kingdom  have  sustained  man  in  his  hours  of  greatest  pain  and  fear, 
because  he  has  felt  that  all  his  sufferings  would  be  accounted  as  in- 
vestments in  a  heavenly  bank.  These  antithetical  and  compensatory 
conceptions  have  thus  had  the  greatest  supportive  power.  As  pre- 
Columbian  navigators  thought  they  could  sail  off  on  the  sea,  and,  by 
direct  continuity  if  they  went  far  enough,  reach  the  sun,  moon,  and 
stars,  so  the  heavenly  Kingdom  as  now  interpreted  is  something  that 
will  be  entered  by  imperceptible  gradations,  and  there  will  be  no  break 
and  no  great  commencement  day  as  the  earth  slowly  graduates  into 
the  Kingdom. 

(7)  The  prayer  for  daily  bread  is  for  growth  and  nutrition,  which 
is  basal.  Trophic  prophecies  underlie  life,  which  has  in  the  past  been 
largely  a  struggle  for  food.  In  general,  species  have  become  extinct 
either  because  they  failed  to  find  it  or  became  themselves  food  for 
other  species.  Hunger  is  the  first  and,  with  love,  the  strongest  instinct. 
The  bonds  of  conunensaHty  are  the  closest.  Breaking  bread  together 
is  more  than  a  symbol  of  the  closest  brotherhood,  and  sometimes 
constitutes  the  act  of  marriage;  while  in  many  primitive  tribes,  as 
Tnunbull  has  shown,  the  blood  covenant,  effected  by  mutual  transfu- 
sion of  blood,  is  the  strongest  of  all  ties.  Famine  and  thirst  bring  out 
the  most  bestial  quahties,  and  may  cause  one  of  the  most  dreadful 
forms  of  death.  To  feed  the  hungry  is  the  most  imperative  charity, 
even  before  that  of  clothing  the  naked,  and  is  the  first  duty  of  hospital- 
ity. Food  colonies  are  the  lowest  social  organizations  in  the  animal 
world.  There  is  a  sense,  too,  brought  home  to  us  by  the  remarkable 
studies  of  the  Pawlow  school,  supplemented  by  the  work  of  Truro, 
Sternberg,  and  Dejerine  from  their  very  different  standpoints,  in  which 
every  psychic  activity  is  due  to  the  hunger  of  brain  or  other  cells; 
these  are  fed  by  the  satisfaction  of  curiosity,  which  abounds  in  anal- 


JESUS'  ETHICS  AND  PRAYER  513 

ogies  with  appetite,  while  even  the  gastropathies  and  psychic  anorexias 
are  rich  in  spiritual  analogies.  Ail  that  Hves,  whether  community  or 
molecule,  is  on  the  way  up  if  anabolism  can  do  its  work,  or,  if  kataboUsm 
is  excessive,  begins  to  degenerate.  Every  disease,  whatever  its  cause, 
involves  partial  starvation  of  some  organ  or  tissue,  which  is  shut  off 
from  its  due  irrigation  by  the  blood,  the  all-feeding  fluid.  Food 
monopoUes  are  the  worst  of  all,  and  food  adulteration  is  one  of  the 
most  inimical  of  crimes.  This  petition,  therefore,  is  not  only  the  best 
of  all  table  prayers  as  it  stands,  but  is  full  of  endless  analogies  in  the 
psychic  and  moral  realm. 

(8)  The  forgiveness  of  debts  is  more  remote  from  modern  thought. 
Incurring  debts  is  not  unknown  in  primitive  communities,  where  lib- 
erty and  even  Hfe  may  be  pledged  to  cancel  obligations.  The  hope  or 
promise  to  repay,  however,  enables  poverty  to  maintain  its  self- 
respect.  As  property  and  its  rites  were  developed,  the  laws  against 
debtors  were  often  very  severe.  They  have  been  branded,  labelled, 
pilloried,  imprisoned,  tortured,  and  even  their  families,  relatives,  and 
friends  have  suffered  with  them.  They  have  been  transported  as 
convicts;  and  society  regards  improvidence,  which  the  ants  are  a 
constant  parable  to  avoid,  with  little  leniency,  although  modern  bank- 
ruptcy acts  show  an  interesting  evolution  of  sentiment  in  the  direction 
of  answering  this  item  of  the  prayer  of  ages.  Nevertheless,  to  forgive 
just  debts  is  only  one  step  easier  than  to  love  enemies.  The  evolution 
of  property*  shows  that  it  arose  as  an  extension  of  the  ego.  The  rich 
man  feels  the  pulsations  of  his  own  life  in  all  he  owns,  somewhat  as 
Lotze's  clothes  philosophy  thinks  one  of  their  uses  was  to  extend  the 
sense  of  the  wearer's  physical  ego.  The  millionaire  feels  himself  al- 
most identified  with  all  his  interests.  Relinquishment  therefore  means 
restriction  of  the  contours  of  his  affective  and  effective  personality, 
and  is  directly  in  the  teeth  of  all  instincts  of  self-aggrandizement.  On 
the  other  hand,  we  are  here  reminded  that  we  are  all  poor  debtors 
before  God's  high  assize.  On  the  strict  scale  of  debit  and  credit  we 
owe  our  parents  for  food,  clothing,  protection,  and  care;  we  owe 
school  or  college,  the  city  and  state,  for  our  protection;  but  above  all, 
we  owe  to  the  heavenly  Father  not  only  all  we  have  but  all  we  are. 
There  is  no  standard  by  which  to  measure  this  debt;  but  it  is  infinite 
and  inextinguishable,  so  that  all  we  have  we  should  hold  as  his  stewards 

iSee  L.  W.  Kline  and  C.  J.  France:  "Psychology  of  Ownenhip."    Ptd.  Sem.,  xSgg. 


514  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

with  full  accountability,  for  should  he  foreclose  we  should  have  nothing, 
and  should  lose  Hfe  itself.  The  Stoics,  even  before  the  early  Church, 
glimpsed  this  conception  in  challenging  private  ownership  in  anything 
essential  for  support  of  life  and  the  common  weal.  Thus  God  owns  us, 
body  and  soul,  with  absolute  power  so  to  dispose  of  us  as  he  sees  fit, 
for  he  made  not  only  us  but  our  world,  and  we  are  all  his  servants, 
either  good  or  bad.  This  debt  is  only  forgiven,  therefore,  when  we 
become  true  sons,  make  his  will  ours,  and  hold  all  that  we  have  and  are 
as  his  factors.  But  it  needs  only  insight  and  not  mere  Calvinistic 
blood  to  show  that  the  race  has  drifted  from  this  norm;  that  much  has 
been  overdone  and  much  underdone;  that  substance  has  been  wasted, 
effort  misdirected;  that  the  race  has  blundered  along,  so  that  real  his- 
tory is  very  different  from  what  it  should  have  been.  We  should  treat 
others,  therefore,  as  we  would  have  God  treat  us.  If  our  friends  injure 
or  owe  us,  we  should  be  mindful  of  the  great  remissions  we  have  en- 
joyed, and  practise  divine  magnanimity.  When  impelled  to  exact 
even  just  claims  upon  those  unable  to  meet  them,  we  should  simply 
think  of  our  own  faults  and  the  penalties  due  us  which  we  have  es- 
caped. 

(9)  As  to  temptation,  it  always  ideally  involves  some  moral  waste; 
for  life  is  easily  conceived  of  as  so  pure  that  it  can  have  no  hold  upon 
us,  so  that  impeccability  is  more  perfect  if  temptation  has  never  been 
known.  It  usually  involves  deliberation,  and  always  a  moral  conflict, 
suggesting  the  familiar  proverb  that  the  woman  who  deliberates  is  lost. 
While  this  sets  forth  the  dangers  of  temptation,  it  is  a  glorification  of 
her  deeper  intuitive  natural  instincts  and  automatic  organization,  but 
a  libel  on  her  intelligence  and  consciousness,  because  it  implies  their 
untrustworthiness,  as  if  consideration,  convention,  the  artifacts  of 
education  or  environment,  were  less  organized  and  therefore  less  to  be 
trusted  than  intuition.  If  human  nature  had  been  radically  bad,  and 
the  good  superposed  upon  it  by  precept  and  training,  the  reverse  would 
be  true,  and  the  woman  who  did  not  deUberate  would  be  lost.  Jesus 
thus  expresses  naively  his  belief  in  the  fundamental  goodness  of  human 
nature,  and  that  it  is  not  wise  to  commit  virtue  to  the  keeping  of  a 
deliberative  moral  consciousness  where  the  pros  and  cons  of  right  and 
wrong  are  weighed,  debates  with  passion  encouraged,  and  choices  made 
as  a  result  of  careful  consideration. 

(10)  "Deliver  us  from  e\'il,"  has  been,  as  we  saw  elsewhere,  the 


JESUS'  ETHICS  AND  PRAYER  515 

greatest  of  all  solicitudes  of  the  human  soul,  from  the  first  apotropaic 
prayer  and  sacrifice  to  unknown  powers  down  to  our  own  day.  All  burnt 
offerings,  all  superstitious  fears,  especially  those  with  a  moral  root, 
are  bred  of  phobias  of  impending  evil,  which  always  threatens  within 
and  without.  Not  only  did  man  struggle  for  ages  with  nature,  with 
the  great  beasts  of  the  prime,  disease,  and  death;  but  his  fate  was 
jeopardized  by  rapacious  passion,  ignorance,  and  superstition.  To 
escape  evil  prompts  every  effort,  brings  foresight,  makes  for  survival 
and  the  accomplishment  of  our  vocation  as  men.  This  item  of  the 
prayer  expresses  the  perf ervour  of  the  desire  not  only  for  continuance  and 
complete  well-being,  but  for  development.  The  answer  to  this  prayer 
involves  escape  from  post-mortem  evil  and  the  exemption  of  the  soul 
from  anxiety,  the  mother  of  all  fears.  It  may  involve,  too,  some  deep 
Buddhistic  insight  into  the  ills  inherent  in  all  existence,  and  express  the 
optative  sentiment  that  we  may  pass  safely  through  this  vale  of  tears 
inoffensively,  and  inmiaculately  innocent  of  every  stain  of  finitude  or 
even  individuation.  Fear  of  evil  has  been  the  spur  that  has  created 
medicine  and  even  science  as  prevision,  as  well  as  every  protective 
immunizing  or  insuring  agency,  so  that  as  in  the  former  items  we  are 
touching  another  of  the  fundamentals  of  human  life. 

(11)  In  the  ascription  of  the  Kingdom,  glory  and  power  to  God, 
some  have  fancied  pantheism,  although  the  Kingdom  implies  a  personal 
ruler,  and  power  and  glory  are  certainly  consistent  with  theism. 
But  what  if  an  all-pervading  God-consciousness  like  that  of  Spinoza 
toward  a  being  too  great  to  submit  to  the  hmitations  involved  in  per- 
sonaUty,  but  in  whom  we  live,  move,  and  have  our  being,  does  work 
in  the  background?  We  ought  to  understand  by  this  time  that  no 
deeply  religious  soul  can  possibly  escape  the  undertow  of  this  great 
current.  God  is  all.  Everything  in  the  world  is  in  a  sense  a  mode, 
form,  speaking-tube,  or  persona  of  him,  and  the  ultimate  reason  of  all 
the  foregoing  desiderata  is  found  in  the  grand  old  Oriental  refrain  that 
God  is  all  and  in  all,  and  that  apocatastasis  is  the  final  cause  of  crea- 
tion. At  any  rate,  it  helps  us  to  know  that  if  experience,  philosophy, 
science,  or  the  right  attitude  to  poetry,  force  us  to  choose  between  per- 
sonality and  something  higher  than  it  rather  than  lower,  we  can  fall 
back  on  assents  as  old  as  the  Mana  doctrine,  and  feel  that  we  rest  in 
everlasting  arms,  and  that  if  our  bark  of  system  sinks  it  is  to  a  vaster 
sea.    All  modern  studies  of  the  ego  show  that  it  is  not  simple,  but 


5i6  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

infinitely  complex,  at  best  a  kind  of  vinculum  containing  various  quan- 
tities, both  known  and  unknown,  carried  on  together  through  the  whole 
equation  of  Hfe  for  convenience,  till  each  element  receives  its  final 
evaluation.  The  elements  of  human  selfhood  are  loosely  wrought 
together  and  easily  break  up  as  in  the  phenomena  of  dual  or  multiple 
personaHty,  while  our  truest  self  is  below  the  threshold  of  conscious- 
ness, and  therefore  of  unknown  value,  so  that  consciousness  can  never 
serve  as  a  pattern  of  absolute  existence.  Indeed,  all  recent  studies  of 
prayer  seem  to  show  that  the  basal  motivation  of  it  is  unification  with 
the  deeper  unconscious  elements  of  the  soul,  and  back  of  these,  with  the 
orientation  to  the  background  of  the  universe  itself.^ 


'  A.  L.  Strong:  "Relation of ^he  Subconscious  to  Prayer,'^  Am.  J.  Relig.  Psychol.,  1006-07,  vol.  2,  p.  160-167.    JB 
"  *     ~      ......       .  -  -  .  „      .       ...^  Ransom:  "Studies  in  the  Psy- 

in  Its  History  uid  Psychology.'' 


Pratt:  "An  Empirical  Study  of  Prayer."    Ibid.,  Vol.  4,  pp.  48-67,  ipii.    Stephen  W.  Ransom:  "Studies^in  the  Psy 
chology  of  Prayer."  Ibid.,  1904.    Vol.  x,  pp.  ia9-i43.    F.  0.  Beck:    Prayer,  a  Study  ' 


Ibid.,  1906,  Vol.  a,  pp.  I07-I3i. 


CHAPTER  NINE 

THE  PARABLES  OF  JESUS 

The  following  is  the  classification  of  Jiilicher,  the  chief  contempo- 
rary authority  on  the  parables,  whose  rubrics  are  followed  in  this 
chapter: 

A.  Comparison  parables:  i.  The  budding  fig-tree  as  a  herald  of 
spring.  2.  Constant  slaves  to  duty  without  thanks.  3.  Piping  and 
dancing  children.  4.  A  son  asking  a  fish  and  getting  a  scorpion. 
5.  The  disciple  and  pupil  not  above  the  teacher.  6.  The  blind  leader 
of  the  blind.  7.  What  goes  out  of  and  not  what  enters  the  body  de- 
files. 8.  The  salt  of  the  earth.  9.  The  light  on  a  candlestick.  10. 
The  city  on  a  hill.  11.  The  revealing  of  the  concealed.  12.  The  eye 
as  the  Hght  of  the  body.  13.  Serving  two  masters  impossible.  14.  The 
tree  known  by  its  fruits.  15.  A  scribe  instructed  in  the  Kingdom. 
16.  The  carcass-gathering  eagles.  17.  The  watch  set  if  we  know  when 
the  thief  is  coming.  18.  The  faithful  and  unfaithful  servant.  19.  Re- 
ceiving the  head  of  the  household  late.  20.  "  Physician,  heal  thyself.  '* 
21.  The  sick  and  not  the  well  need  a  physician.  22.  No  fasting  when 
the  bridegroom  is  present.  23.  No  new  patch  on  an  old  garment,  or 
new  wine  in  old  bottles.  24.  Counting  the  cost  of  war  or  a  tower. 
2$.  Satan's  kingdom  divided  against  itself.  26.  Agree  with  an  enemy 
quickly  for  fear  of  judge  and  prison.  27.  Take  the  lowest  seat.  28. 
Children  and  dogs  eat  crumbs. 

B.  True  parables:  29.  The  house  on  the  rock  or  sand.  30.  The 
neighbour  importuned  arises  and  gives  food.  31.  The  widow  and  the 
unjust  judge.  32.  The  usurer  and  the  two  debtors.  33.  The  pitiless 
servant.  34.  The  lost  sheep  and  penny.  35.  The  prodigal  son. 
36.  The  brother  who  promised,  and  the  brother  who  went.  37.  The 
defiant  tenant  of  the  vineyard.  38.  The  dechning  guests  to  a  feast. 
39.  The  barren  fig-tree.  40.  The  ten  virgins.  41.  Equal  pay  for  the 
eleventh-hour  man.  42.  The  loaned-out  talents.  43.  The  unjust 
householder.  44.  The  sower  on  different  kinds  of  ground.  45.  Seed 
growing  independently.  46.  Tares  and  wheat.  47.  The  fish-net. 
48.  The  mustard  seed  and  leaven.  49.  The  treasure  and  the  pearl 
of  great  price. 

C.  Illustrative  narratives:  50.  The  good  Samaritan.  51.  The 
Pharisee  and  the  pubHcan.  52.  The  foolish  rich  man.  53.  The  rich 
man  and  poor  Lazarus. 

S17  . 


Si8  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

THE  parables  are  probably  the  best  transmitted  and  most  au- 
thentic of  all  the  teachings  of  Jesus,  of  which  in  Mark  they  con- 
stitute about  one  fourth,  and  in  Matthew  and  Luke  still  more. 
Some  of  them  are  masterpieces  of  effective  popular  impartation. 
Jiilicher,^  who  has  given  the  most  detailed  study  yet  made,  distin- 
guishes three  historic  types  of  their  hermeneutics.  In  the  first  period 
everything  was  allegorized.  In  the  parable,  e.  g.,  of  the  prodigal  son, 
the  father's  property  squandered  by  the  son  stands  for  heathendom, 
the  swine  are  demons,  the  robe  is  the  state  of  Adam  which  was  lost  at 
the  fall,  the  fatted  calf  is  the  body  of  the  Lord  broken  at  the  eucharist, 
etc.  Every  item  and  idea  is  interpreted  by  itself  with  no  reference 
whatever  to  unity,  and  there  is  no  allusion  to  the  customs  of  Jesus'  age 
and  land,  as  if  these  could  contribute  nothing  to  the  eternal  verities 
here  dealt  with,  just  as  sometimes  in  a  charade  or  a  riddle  every  word 
and  phrase  precisely  as  it  stands  is  significant.  In  the  second  period, 
from  Origen  (a.  d.  254)  to  Luther,  only  essentials  were  allegorized. 
Each  parable  was  taken  as  a  whole  and  taught  its  own  distinct  lesson, 
and  to  this  the  occasion  on  which  it  was  uttered  is  often  the  key. 
They  illustrated  Jesus'  condescension  to  the  level  of  folk-thought.  In 
the  third  period,  extending  to  the  present,  nothing  is  allegorized.  Weiss 
goes  so  far  as  to  say  that  Jesus  was  not  striving  for  heuristic  clearness, 
but  was  promulgating  laws  of  the  Kingdom  of  heaven.  Their  higher 
meaning  must  be  intuited.  They  are  the  acme  of  self-luminosity, 
and  to  explain  is  to  obscure  them.  Each  is  best  conceived  as  a  com- 
mand. All  belong  together  as  more  or  less  distinct  specifications 
concerning  the  central  theme  of  the  Kingdom.  While  old  and  new 
methods  of  interpretation  are  still  found,  the  old  allegorization  is  on 
the  wane. 

Parables  fall  readily  into  four  groups.^  (i)  Simple  comparisons 
whereby  one  statement  is  made  more  objective  by  another:  as,  e.  g., 
the  budding  fig-tree  as  a  sign  of  summer,  or  whereas  a  servant  who  is 
ordered  to  do  as  he  is  told,  receives  no  thanks  (Luke  xvii:  7-10),  so 
every  man  must  serve  the  Lord.  Jesus  had  a  genius  for  such  illustra- 
tions. (2)  Narratives  or  storiettes  not  unlike  fables.  These  are 
numerous,  e.  g.,  the  sower,  the  woman  and  the  unjust  judge,  the  usurer 
and  his  debtor,  the  lost  penny,  the  lost  sheep,  the  prodigal  son,  the 


•"Die  Gleichnisreden  Jesu."    Leiprig,  i8oo-    Bd.  i,  3a8  p.;  Bd.  a,  643  p. 

•P.  SUude:  "Die  Bedeutung  der  Gleichnisreden  Jesu  in  unsercr  Zeit."    Langensalza,  1903,  18  p. 


THE  PARABLES  OF  JESUS  519 

unfruitful  vineyard,  the  barren  fig-tree,  the  ten  virgins,  the  unwilling 
guests,  equal  reward  for  unequal  work,  the  talents,  the  unjust  house- 
holder. (3)  A  third  class  contains  neither  comparisons  nor  parables 
in  the  strict  sense.  Here  belong  the  rich  man  and  Lazarus,  the  piti- 
ful Samaritan,  the  fooUsh  rich  man,  the  Pharisee  and  the  pubUcan. 
These  are  not  strictly  parables,  because  the  story  does  not  run  in  an- 
other domain,  but  the  incident  is  rather  an  example  illustrating  a  gen- 
eral principle.  (4)  The  fourth  class  is  peculiar  to  John,  and  is  best 
illustrated  in  the  pericope  of  the  good  shepherd.  Such  a  complex 
of  analogous  statements  is  an  allegor}'',  always  hovering  in  a  half  light 
in  which  we  do  not  compare  but  substitute  terms,  without  which  the 
meaning  is  not  clearly  seen. 

Jesus  taught  in  parables,  not,  as  the  synoptists  seem  to  have  thought, 
in  order  to  obscure,  but  rather  to  clarify  his  meaning.  They  tell  us 
not  only  much  incidentally  about  the  local  and  temporal  conditions 
of  Jesus'  Hfe,  but  suggest  that  during  his  prepubhc  years  in  his  solitary 
musings  he  had  come  to  symbolize  much  in  his  physical  and  social  en- 
vironment by  investing  their  items  with  higher  meanings  so  that  the 
parables  give  us  glimpses  of  how  in  his  own  marvellous,  if  primitive, 
method  of  growth  all  things  had  come  to  speak  to  him  of  something 
above  themselves.  They  give  us  perhaps  the  best  of  all  examples  of 
how  the  human  soul  works  its  way  on  to  truth  in  a  prelogical  stage,  when 
imagination  and  intuition  are  everything  and  logical  concatenation 
has  not  begun  its  work  of  coordinating  and  harmonizing  insights  in 
different  directions.  If  Jesus  was,  however,  no  mere  poet  or  mystic 
on  the  one  hand,  nor  on  the  other  a  man,  with  his  intuitive  insights 
utterly  unconstellated,  they  did  nevertheless  converge  toward  one 
practical  goal — the  Kingdom,  of  which  both  the  incidents  of  his  experi- 
ence and  his  intuitions  had  become  so  eloquent  in  his  own  soul.  Apt, 
too,  and  well  motivated  as  the  parables  generally  are  to  the  occasion 
on  which  they  were  enunciated,  they  could  hardly  have  been  ad  hoc 
extemporizations. 

They  have  also  been  grouped  into  chronological  cycles  according 
to  topics,  fulness  of  details,  lucidity  or  obscurity,  etc.  Some  have  such 
verisimilitude  that  they  have  been  thought  to  be  actual  events  utihzed 
for  illustrative  purposes,  and  most  are  so  natural  that  they  might  have 
occurred  at  almost  any  time  or  place.  As  the  chief  theme  of  the  mir- 
acles is  the  new  hfe,  so  that  of  the  parables  is  the  Kingdom,  what  it  is. 


S30  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

how  it  comes,  who  enters,  how,  etc.  They  are  of  various  degrees  of 
homiletic  value,  and  the  meaning  of  some  is  so  obvious  as  to  be  ahnost 
commonplace,  while  others  are  cryptic  and  very  diversely  understood. 
They  often  overlap  or  teach  almost  identical  lessons,  or  show  only 
slight  differences  of  aspect  or  relation  in  their  themes;  while  it  is  baf- 
fling if  not  impossible  to  harmonize  others,  either  with  one  another  or 
with  other  utterances  of  Jesus  on  the  same  topic.  They  are  the  best- 
known  and  most  portable  of  all  his  teachings,  and  some  have  furnished 
favourite  themes  to  art. 

Although  a  few  occur  in  ancient  Hebrew  Uterature,  canonical  and 
other,  parables  are  in  a  large  measure  Jesus'  unique  creation.  His 
method  was  not  that  of  the  dialogue  or  of  dialectic,  for  he  rarely  dis- 
cussed or  reasoned,  nor  did  he  ever  show  Socratic  irony  by  evoking 
callow  opinions  on  the  part  of  his  hearers  and  then  gradually  leading 
them  on  toward  his  own  view  by  showing  contradictions  in  theirs. 
He  was  not  a  midwife  but  an  impregnator,  handing  down  truth  to  be 
accepted  intuitively  and  lived  out,  not  argued  about  or  debated.  The 
parables  show  how  to  his  mind  the  facts  of  nature  and  the  events  of 
human  life  were  not  merely  what  they  seem  but  were  transfigured, 
transparent,  translucent,  supercharged  by  meanings  behind  and  above 
them.  "A  primrose  by  a  river's  brim"  was  not  to  him,  as  it  was  to 
Peter  Bell,  nothing  but  a  yellow  primrose;  but  rather  like  the  "flower 
in  the  crannied  wall,"  which  really  to  know  was  to  know  what  God  and 
man  are.  If  it  can  be  said  at  all  that  the  phenomenal  world  was  to 
Jesus  only  an  appearance,  it  is  not  in  the  metaphysical  sense  of  re- 
vealing the  transcendent  noumenal  entity,  but  as  being  essentially 
only  types  and  symbols  of  moral  values,  and  so  ancillary  to  these  that 
they  would  shortly  be  sloughed  off  and  pass  away  to  give  place  to  a 
new  heaven  and  earth  when  the  day  of  righteousness  came.  On  the 
other  hand,  the  fact  that  the  Great  Parable-maker  could  find  so  much 
in  the  moral  and  social  order  of  his  day  and  time  that  spoke  so  clearly 
of  the  Kingdom  suggests  that  though  many  would  change  or  pass, 
many,  and  perhaps  more,  would  abide  when  it  came. 

Most  Protestant  literature  on  the  parables  in  EngHsh  (Trench, 
Bruce,  Dodds,  Lang,  Kirk,  Taylor,  Thompson,  Maturin,  Hubbard, 
Arnot,  and  many  more)  is  chiefly  for  edification.  Unless  we  except 
Trench,  it  is  on  the  low  level  of  scholarship  that  is  content  to  compare 
parallel  passages  and  versions  in  the  New  Testament,  less  often  ex- 


THE  PARABLES  OF  JESUS  521 

tending  to  the  Old;  very  rarely  attempting  to  extract  meanings  from 
the  original  language,  and  almost  never  with  allusions  to  passages  in 
the  texts  of  other  religions.  Save  in  Trench  we  rarely  find  allusions 
to  patristic  interpretation,  which  is  a  rich  and  suggestive,  if  often 
picturesque,  field.  Thus  JiiUcher,  with  his  vaster  learning,  rarely 
finds  in  EngHsh  anything  he  deems  worthy  of  citation.  Yet  from  it 
all  we  can  best  realize  how  deeply  embedded  in  the  imaginal  thought, 
and  still  more  in  the  sentiment,  of  popular  Christian  experience  are 
the  personages  and  incidents.  Like  a  magnet  each  of  the  leading 
parables  has  drawn  about  itself  all  the  mass  of  meanings  within  the 
sphere  of  its  attraction  till  it  might  be  compared  to  a  special  complex 
or  constellation,  so  that  a  large  part  of  the  moral  hfe  is  interpreted  in 
its  terms.  In  this  sense  the  art  of  the  parables  has  become  more  real 
than  history.  The  habit  of  extracting  manifold  meanings  from  them 
has  also  done  much  to  predispose  Christian  scholarship  and  thought  to 
interpret  the  record  of  historic  events  in  the  same  symbolic  way,  as 
Farrar's  "History  of  Interpretation' '  abundantly  shows.  While  insisting 
on  their  historicity,  events  are  regarded  as  also  carrying  one  or  perhaps 
a  whole  sheaf  of  higher  messages,  and  facts  are  endlessly  allegorized. 
In  the  vast  body  of  conmients  on  the  parables,  of  which  the  above  are 
illustrations,  we  find  a  surprising  rarity  of  their  application  to  daily 
secular  duty;  they  are  far  more  often  brought  home  to  vaguer  hovering 
religious  experiences.  There  is  not  so  much  withdrawal  from  pressing 
business  and  social  reaUty  as  failure  to  reach  it  with  the  directness  and 
force  with  which  the  inculcations  of  parables  might  be  driven  home 
to  the  very  core  of  modern  individual  life;  which  raises  the  question 
whether  the  pulpit  has  actually  used  them  without  reservation,  be- 
cause they  really  touch  the  most  vital  matters  of  life  and  mind. 

The  new  Tubingen  school,  culminating,  so  far  as  the  parables  are 
concerned,  in  Volkmar  and  Loman,  think  that  everything,  not  only  in 
the  Apostolic  Age  but  later,  was  coloured  or  motivated  by  three  rival 
tendencies  or  parties — ^PauHnism,  Judaism,  and  Petrinism.  The  last, 
while  more  or  less  mediating  between  these  extreme  views,  is  strongly 
anti-Pauline.  In  this  school,  from  Baur  down,  the  first  thing  to  be 
determined  of  any  New  Testament  writer  is  his  attitude  to  Paul,  the 
Johannin  current  only  being  more  or  less  independent.  Even  Renan, 
who  to  some  degree  escapes  this  tendency,  thinks  that  the  seven  chief 
parables  of  the  Kingdom  reflect  later  ideas.    The  parable,  e.  g.,  of  the 


522  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

eleventh-hour  workman  who  received  the  same  pay  as  those  who 
had  wrought  all  day,  refers  to  Paul,  and  therefore  underwent  a  redac- 
tion, and  so  did  all  the  sayings  to  the  effect  that  the  last  shall  be  first. 
These  jealousies,  especially  between  Paul  and  the  disciples,  represented 
by  Peter,  are  thought  to  have  strongly  motivated  all  early  writings 
till,  later,  in  the  interests  of  the  Church,  the  traces  of  this  old  antago- 
nism were  carefully  scored  away.^  Volkmar  seems  to  think  that  we 
owe  to  partisan  and  controversial  motives  the  very  impulse  to  write 
Gospels  and  epistles  and  that  the  first  effort  of  the  critic  now  should 
be  to  know  each  author's  tendency  or  bias,  so  that  to  some  degree  we 
can  predict  what  he  would  select  from  the  floating  body  of  tradition, 
what  he  would  omit,  what  he  would  bring  into  the  foreground,  what  he 
would  keep  in  the  background,  and  even  what  he  would  be  likely  to  invent 
or  poetize.  But  the  many  variations  of  details  in  the  different  writers, 
together  with  the  essential  identity  of  content,  can  only  mean  genuine- 
ness and  a  common  source,  which  must  go  back  to  Jesus.  ^Esop's  fables 
were  not  recorded  for  centuries  after  his  death,  and  in  very  different 
renderings;  but  they,  too,  show  amid  petty  variations  identity  of 
content. 

The  word  "parable"  occurs  fifty  times  in  the  New  Testament, 
all  times  in  the  synoptists;  although,  subtracting  parallels,  it  occurs  but 
thirty.  All  represent  Jesus  as  having  a  predilection  for  using  this  rhetori- 
cal form.  Mark  uses  the  word  thirteen  times  for  six  different  narratives ; 
Matthew,  seventeen  times  for  twelve;  Luke,  eighteen  times,  seventeen 
of  which  are  for  the  same  parables  as  are  recorded  by  Matthew  and 
Mark.  This  "comparison"  or  "example"  way  of  teaching  may  ob- 
scure or  enlighten.  The  one  train  of  thought  or  description  is  obvious, 
but  the  other  is  in  more  or  less  need  of  rebus-wise  interpretation.  Par- 
ables challenge  the  hearer  to  find  the  higher  parallel  meaning.  They 
are  thus  in  a  sense  Binet  tests  of  spiritual  insight,  as  to  see  a  joke  is  a 
test  of  humour.  To  see  only  their  literal  meaning  suggests  the  naivet6 
of  childhood,  even  more  than  does  the  tendency  to  take  miracles  liter- 
ally. Thus  for  genetic  religious  psychology  they  serve  as  moron- 
finders.  A  parable  is  a  patent,  postulating  a  latent  meaning,  always 
requiring  some  psychoanalysis,  as  does  a  dream.  It  does  not  merely 
involve  a  parallelism  of  happenings  in  two  domains,  as  Jiilicher  thinks 
{Op.  cit.  Bd.  I,  S.  80),  but  the  lower  is  given  to  find  the  higher,  as  a 

'See  an  account  of  thii  movement  In  my  "Founders  of  Modern  Psychology."    iqii,  p.  6>ig. 


THE  PARABLES  OF  JESUS  523 

fable  is  a  story  the  framework  of  which  supports  a  higher  significance. 
Both  in  a  sense  particularize  some  general  truths,  and  in  both,  as  well 
as  in  constructing  allegory,  analogy,  symbol,  simile,  etc.,  there  must  be 
much  Rucksicht  auf  DarstellbarkeiL  The  synoptists  called  them 
"dark  sayings"  because,  and  when,  they  did  not  understand  them. 
Perhaps  some  of  them  showed  Jesus'  own  tentative  efforts  to  bring  the 
truth  he  sought  more  clearly  to  his  mind,  or  to  grasp  it  better,  so  that 
they  might  not  have  been  all  primarily  pedagogic.  Some  of  them 
seem  to  have  been  the  results  of  sudden  intuition.  It  has  been  said 
that,  effective  as  they  were,  the  masses  were  not  convinced,  or  else 
they  would  never  have  cried  "Crucify  him."  In  Mark  the  parables 
constitute  a  quarter  or  more  of  all  Jesus'  words,  and  in  Luke  nearly 
half  of  all  he  said  from  his  first  public  appearance  to  his  arrest,  but  we 
can  hardly  say  that  this  tendency  grew.  At  least,  John  records  not 
one  true  parable. 

In  the  parables  we  see  farthest  into  Jesus'  own  heart.  The  chief 
of  them  pertain  to  the  Kingdom,  and  without  them  we  should  have 
comparatively  little  knowledge  of  how  he  regarded  it.  For  the  first 
thousand  years  the  Church  looked  on  them  as  essentially  for  edification 
and  explanation,  and  refused  to  admit  their  teachings  into  the  body  of 
theology.  This  idea  of  parable  hermeneutics  which  forbade  their  use 
in  argument  conceived  their  appeal  to  be  to  the  heart  and  will  rather 
than  to  the  reason.  Now,  however,  we  have  a  parabolic  theology,  very 
much  debated  to  be  sure,  but  which  has  come  in  with  the  recognition 
that  the  parables  are  the  most  genuine  and  the  best  transmitted  of  all 
the  teachings  of  Jesus.  In  them  many  think  we  have  his  personality 
and  his  higher  theanthropic  consciousness;  but  we  must  not  go  too  far 
in  this  direction,  for  in  the  parables  Jesus  speaks  far  more  of  the 
Father  than  of  himself.  There  is  little  Paulinism  and  no  allusion  to 
the  vicarious  atonement.  Here  Jesus'  sense  of  his  Divine  Sonship  is 
not  developed  into  a  sense  of  his  divinity.  The  salvation  that  he 
teaches  is  entirely  independent  of  his  death.  The  Kingdom  is  already 
at  hand  and  open,  not  because  Jesus  is  trusted  by  the  Father  as  about 
to  offer  himself  as  a  ransom  for  sin  on  the  cross,  but  because  the  dear 
Father  cannot  refuse  to  answer  prayer.  In  other  words,  Jesus  is  here 
teaching  not  a  saviour  but  salvation;  not  he  himself  but  history  later 
made  him  a  saviour.  (See  Jiilicher,  Bd.  i,  S.  152  et  seq.)  Thus  he  was 
a  redeemer  before  he  died,  and  indeed  we  may  add  he  would  have 


S24  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

been  so  in  a  sense  had  he  not  died.  His  self-feeling  in  the  parables, 
to  be  sure,  gives  him  a  place  in  the  Kingdom.  He  evolved  laws  of  the 
Kingdom,  one  after  another,  from  his  own  self-consciousness,  and  while 
he  felt  himself  stronger  than  Satan  and  conceived  himself  as  a  Messiah, 
his  concern  is  almost  entirely  with  his  work  and  not  with  himself. 
If  we  knew  their  chronological  order  it  might  shed  Hght  upon  the 
evolution  of  his  ideas,  but  the  synoptists  differ  very  widely  in  this 
respect,  and  as  they  present  the  parables  in  so  many  degrees  of  fulness, 
it  is  doubtful  whether  we  can  ever  find  their  genetic  sequence.  The 
common  Christian  conception  is  that  they  represent  the  same  level  of 
consciousness,  without  traces  of  developmental  stages.  All  of  them 
together  are  not  in  themselves  sufficient  to  serve  as  a  basis  for  an  entire 
system  of  theology,  important  as  they  are  for  Jesus'  pedagogy  and 
psychology.  Most,  even  critics,  panegyrize  them  as  models,  although 
they  can  hardly  be  called  works  of  art.  His  was  a  rather  dark  age  of 
Hebrew  Hterature;  at  least  it  was  far  below  the  prophetic  age,  and  the 
parables  by  no  means  equal  the  prophecies  in  form.  Moreover,  Jesus 
had  higher  than  aesthetic  ends  in  view.  In  respect  to  form  it  is  absurd 
to  compare  them,  as  many  have  done,  with  Homer,  Sophocles,  Isaiah, 
Habakkuk,  Dante,  or  Shakespeare,  or  to  call  them  the  "greatest 
poetry  in  the  world."  They  he  rather  more  in  the  domain  of  oratory 
than  in  that  of  poetry.  Compared  to  the  above  classic  authors  Jesus 
is  as  JEsop  to  the  ornate  La  Fontaine.  Jesus'  thought  is  of  the  highly 
imaginal  type,  as  Goethe  said  his  own  was.  This  instinct  to  compare 
similia  similihus  was  for  him  an  expression  of  idealism.  The  very 
homeliness  of  the  parables  constitutes  much  of  their  charm,  and  per- 
haps still  more  of  their  effectiveness.  If  there  are  traces  of  exaggera- 
tion, yet  there  is  no  caricature.  The  size  of  the  tree  that  grew  from  a 
grain  of  mustard  seed,  the  ten  thousand  talents,  the  extreme  unwilling- 
ness of  the  invited  guests,  the  one  hour  which  the  belated  labourers 
served  instead  of  two  hours  in  a  somewhat  similar  Buddhistic  legend, 
the  extreme  joy  at  finding  the  lost  penny,  the  severity  of  some  penalties 
— these  may  perhaps  be  a  Uttle  Oriental  but  are  hardly  intemperate. 
The  treachery  of  the  householder,  the  conscienceless  judge,  the  busi- 
ness shrewdness  of  the  man  who  found  the  pearl  of  great  price,  were 
not  censured,  and  this  Renan  has  thought  significant,  but  Jesus'  gallery 
of  characters  and  the  repertory  of  acts  had  to  contain  both  good  and 
bad. 


THE  PARABLES  OF  JESUS  525 

The  chief  attack  on  the  parables  has  been  that  they  were  not 
origmal  with  Jesus.  The  early  Church  regarded  most  of  the  Old  Testa- 
ment as  parable  and  subordinated  its  historicity  to  its  meaning.  Some 
of  Jesus'  parables,  like  the  "good  shepherd"  and  the  vineyard,  seem 
amplified  from  Old  Testament  metaphors.  If  we  look  to  the  apoc- 
rypha or  pseudepigraphy,  and  especially  to  the  Talmud,  midrashy  and 
cabaHstic  writings,  as  has  often  been  done  since  Lightfoot  (d.  1675), 
we  learn  that  many  Christian  and  Jewish  writers  have  unearthed  from 
these  sources  not  a  few  more-or-less  remote  analogues  to  the  parables 
of  Jesus,  and  extremists  have  almost  derived  the  New  Testament  from 
rabbinical  literature.  Wetstein  (1751  f.),  Noack  (1839),  Van  Koets- 
veld  (1858),  Muscoviter  (1882),  A.  Wiinsche,  Havet,  and  others  have 
stressed  the  haggadah  as  the  nurse  of  Jesus'  mind  and  teaching.  It  has 
always  been  a  problem  to  ascertain  how  much  of  this  voluminous  Ht- 
erature  Jesus  knew.  Scholars  find  a  few  rabbinical  storiettes  with  a 
moral  that  suggest  some  of  the  parables  of  Jesus.  To  illustrate: 
A  king  singled  out  one  of  his  many  labourers  who  was  well-favoured 
and  who  distinguished  himself  by  industry  and  skill,  and  he  walked 
and  talked  with  him  openly.  All  the  employees  were  paid  the  same 
wage  at  the  end  of  the  day,  and  the  rest  murmured  that  this  new  fa- 
vourite who  had  wrought  but  two  hours  was  given  the  same  wage  as 
those  who  had  worked  all  day.  But  they  were  told  by  the  king  that 
the  favoured  one  had  done  as  much  in  two  hours  as  they  had  done  all 
day.  So  in  another  tale  a  genius  died  young,  and  it  was  said  that, 
because  he  had  accomplished  as  much  in  the  few  years  he  had  lived  as 
most  did  by  the  end  of  a  long  Hfe,  God  called  him  to  his  reward.  But 
in  general  the  spirit,  frame,  theme,  and  lesson  of  Jesus'  parables  are  very 
different.  If  the  Talmudic  tales  were  commonly  known,  of  course 
Jesus  without  being  taught  them  might  have  caught  suggestions  from 
them.  Just  how  far  his  parables  were  a  de  novo  creation  perhaps  we 
shall  never  know,  but  that  his  merit  is  impaired  by  these  rival  claims 
there  is  Httle  reason  to  believe.  He  surely  drew  less  from  such  extra- 
canonical  sources  than  he  did  from  the  Old  Testament,  and  whatever 
came  from  the  former  or  from  current  tradition  was  probably  no  less 
transformed  and  transfigured. 

Renan,  Havet,  Seydel,  and  many  others  who  have  since  followed 
in  their  wake,  think  that  Jesus'  parables  were  influenced  by  Buddhistic 
literature  by  some  mysterious  way  of  infiltration.    Buddha's  life  and 


526  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

that  of  Christ  are  very  often  paralleled  and  their  teachings  compared. 
Oldenberg  thinks  that  these  two  hves  are  variants  of  the  great  epos  of 
religious  founders.    There  is  some  similarity,  e.  g.,  between  John's 
tale  of  the  cure  of  the  man  born  blind  and  a  Buddhistic  story,  although 
in  John  the  incident  is  reported  as  a  miracle,  not  as  a  parable.    The 
Buddhistic  canon  was  practically  closed  before  Jesus'  day,  but  there 
was  very  much  apocryphal  elaboration  afterward.    Max  Miiller  finds 
what  he  calls  a  striking  coincidence  between  a  pre-Christian  Indie 
tale  and  that  of  the  prodigal  son,  and  there  are  many  other  items  that 
suggest  some  relation,  although  the  student  of  comparative  rehgion 
knows  how  often  legendary  matter  may  be  cast  in  similar  moulds  'n' 
different  races  independently  of  one  another.    The  Evangelists  <  r- 
tainly  show  no  traces  of  Buddhistic  influence,  and  the  problem  as  to 
Jesus  is  not  unlike  that  as  to  whether  Pythagoras  profited  by  the  c  J- 
ture  of  Eg>'pt.    The  Buddhist  tales  vacillate  between  thought  r^nd 
imagery,  fable  and  allegory.    They  are  far  more  rank  in  fancy,  ^.nd 
so  much  longer  that  their  prolixity  sometimes  makes  them  almost 
unreadable  by  Occidentals.    They  often  abound  in  extreme  exaggera- 
tion.   The  phrenologist  Gall  postulated  a  special  parable  facu'ty 
which  he  thought  located  in  the  brain  just  back  of  the  upper  frontal 
skull,  near  the  middle  of  the  forehead.    This  absurdity  might  be  ccn- 
pared  with  that  of  certain  apologists  who  assert  for  Jesus  an  entirely 
unique  faculty  which  created  and  alone  could  use  true  parables,  and 
who  resent  all  rival  claims  as  if  they  were  infringements  of  patent. 
Jesus'  parables  are  at  least  a  species  if  not  a  genus  by  themselves,  while 
if  he  drew  from  Indie  sources,  this  not  only  does  not  lessen  his  inven- 
tiveness but  gives  a  most  useful  hint  to  missionary  pedagogy  in 
India.    Buddha  lived  five  centuries  B.  c,  and  his  cult  was  well  estab- 
lished and  widespread  when  Jesus  was  born;  but  despite  the  oft-traced 
analogies  between  the  two  men  and  their  cults,  the  differences  between 
both  their  lives  and  their  doctrines  are  so  great  as  to  make  them  largely 
incommensurate.    Moreover,  the  Hebrew  mind  was  especially  imper- 
vious to  such  influences.    We  can  but  wish  that  Jesus  knew  and  freely 
drew  from  all  the  above  sources;  and  if  either  accident  or  jealous  design 
has  robbed  us  of  the  evidence  that  he  really  knew  in  a  broad  compara- 
tive way  and  borrowed  freely  where  it  served  his  purpose,  it  would  in- 
deed be  a  great  misfortune.    If  the  author  of  Shakespeare  had  the 
knowledge  of  Bacon  would  it  not  really  enhance  his  originaUty  that, 


THE  PARABLES  OF  JESUS  527 

with  all  the  impedimenta  of  knowledge,  his  mind  selected  from  the 
wide  field  the  richest  material  and  used  it  so  freely  and  creatively? 
Certainly  Shakespeare's  lustre  is  not  dimmed  by  the  fact  that  he  drew 
much  of  the  material  of  his  plays  from  the  various  older  Quellen  that 
Simrock  has  so  convincingly  shown  to  be  his  point  of  departure. 
Let  us  turn  now  to  the  parables  themselves. 

A.      COMPARISON  PARABLES 

1.  After  Jesus  had  vividly  described  the  dreadful  events  attending 
the  second  coming  of  the  Son,  his  disciples  asked  him  privately  by  what 
sign  they  could  foreknow  these  events.  The  answer,  Matt.  xxiv:32; 
Mark  xiii:24-8;  Luke  xxi:29-3i,  called  a  parable,  was  that  as  when  a 
fig-tree  puts  forth  tender  shoots  we  know  summer  is  nigh,  so  when 
these  calamities  begin  to  occur,  the  Kingdom  is  at  hand.  As  buds 
presage  spring,  calamities  presage  the  millennium. 

This  equation  of  relations  halts;  for  while  the  Kingdom  is  like 
spring,  how  can  we  call  calamities  its  buds,  when  one  is  evolution  and 
the  other  revolution?  Though  a  thrice-recorded  riddle  it  is  as  if  Jesus, 
when  asked  to  expound  it,  turned  away  from  his  awful  picture  of  judg- 
ment to  a  milder  mood,  or  else  meant  to  say  reassuringly  to  the  disci- 
ples, "For  you  these  calamities  are  not  meant,  but  the  new  era  will 
steal  over  you  like  gentle  spring";  or  else  he  meant  to  fortify  them 
against  disaster  by  saying  that  to  them  these  horrors  would  have  no 
terror,  but  only  be  signs  of  joy. 

2.  Luke  (xvii:7-io)  makes  Jesus  ask:  Who  will  say  to  his  servant 
coming  in  from  ploughing,  "Go  and  eat?"  He  will  rather  say,  "Pre- 
pare and  serve  me,  and  when  I  have  eaten  and  drunk,  then  you  may  do 
so."  Is  a  servant  thanked  for  thus  doing?  I  trow  not.  So  when  you 
have  done  all  that  you  are  told  to  do,  say:  "We  are  unprofitable  ser- 
vants and  have  only  done  that  which  it  was  our  duty  to  do." 

Thus  Jiilicher  thinks  the  disciples  are  told  that  they  must  be  the 
slaves  of  God,  not  serving  under  a  contract  and  unable  not  only  to 
accumulate  a  store  of  desert  but  even  to  merit  thanks.  Supererogation 
therefore  would  be  impossible.  Subordination  must  be  complete. 
This  illustrates  what  Nietzsche  calls  the  Sklavenmorale  taught  by  Jesus 
and  dear  to  slave-holders  from  whom  not  even  thanks  are  ever  due. 
The  surrender  of  will  must  be  complete.    Some  think  this  a  Pauline 


528  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

interpolation  (because  it  is  so  much  out  of  touch  with  its  context), 
expressing  the  doctrine  so  stressed  by  Paul  that  our  own  righteousness 
is  as  filthy  rags,  an  idea  dear  to  Luther  and  to  Calvin,  while  the  self- 
righteousness  of  the  Pharisees  brings  out  the  opposite  standpoint  by 
contrast.  The  teaching  of  this  passage  is  absolute  subjection  and  sub- 
mission. It  suggests  Schleiermacher's  feehng  of  absolute  dependence 
and  self-evacuation.  We  must  be  not  merely  the  Lord's  henchmen 
but  his  fags  and  factotums. 

3.  This  generation  (Matt,  xi:  16-19;  Luke  vii:3i-35)  is  like  children 
in  the  market  calling  to  their  mates,  "  We  piped  and  ye  did  not  dance, 
we  mourned  and  ye  did  not  weep";  for  John  ate  no  bread  and  drank  no 
wine  but  was  called  a  devil,  while  I  do  both  and  am  called  a  glutton, 
wine-bibber,  and  friend  of  publican  and  sinner.  Wisdom  is  justified  of 
her  children. 

In  both  accounts  the  previous  talk  is  of  John,  but  the  after-context 
differs  so  that  the  historic  place  of  the  incident  is  disputed.  Exegetes 
of  this  illustration  of  Jesus  have  differed  extremely.  Cyril  opines  that 
the  children  were  playing  alternately  wedding  and  funeral  games,  ex- 
pressed by  dancing  and  mourning,  to  two  kinds  of  music,  and  this  he 
infers  rather  from  archaeological  and  antiquarian  studies  than  from  the 
fact  that  such  games  are  favourite  plays  to-day.  Part  of  the  children, 
he  assumes,  at  a  certain  stage  of  the  game  refused  to  play  and  were 
chided  by  the  rest,  which  would  be  a  very  typical  incident  in  plays  and 
games  to-day.  John  is  funereal  with  a  pessimistic  message,  says  Holtz- 
mann  in  substance,  while  Jesus  represents  an  optimistic,  marriage-like 
r61e.  Both  games  were  balked  by  the  powers  that  be,  so  that  the  leader 
of  one  game  was  called  a  devil  and  that  of  the  other  a  glutton.  Jiilicher 
says  the  moral  is  against  Kritikasterthum,  and  the  piping  and  mourning 
are  the  still  small  voice  of  the  Spirit  to  which  men  are  unresponsive. 
Thus  wisdom  is  scorned.  On  the  other  hand,  Jesus  and  John  are  made 
to  accuse  their  hearers  of  not  dancing  to  their  music,  playing  their 
game,  or  justifying  their  wisdom.  The  moral  implication  is  that  no 
one  can  please  those  predisposed  to  censure,  who  will  always  find  some 
pretext  to  pervert  or  find  fault,  and  that  no  course  of  Hfe  or  conduct 
can  suit  constitutional  recalcitrants  or  those  predisposed  to  negativism, 
who  set  their  noluntas  against  the  voluntas  of  others  in  a  way  which  is 
in  some  sense  the  opposite  of  the  servile  submission  taught  in  the  pre- 
ceding parable.  As  for  Aristotle  temperance  was  the  golden  mean 
between  the  two  excesses  of  mortification  of  the  body  and  Epicurean 
license,  so  the  Christian  life  must  justify  itself  by  a  wisdom  equally 
distinct  from  excesses  on  either  side.    So,  too,  in  social  intercourse  the 


THE  PARABLES  OF  JESUS  529 

true  way  to  fulness  of  life  is  not  to  hold  entirely  aloof  from  outcast 
classes  like  publicans  or  harlots,  nor  to  consort  with  them  as  if  we  were 
of  them.  Use  but  not  abuse  all  the  goods  of  life,  eschew  alike  intem- 
perate temperance  and  abandoned  license,  and  ignore  the  demands 
and  fashions  of  a  generation  that  has  lost  the  true  middle  way.  Look 
with  appreciation  sympathetic  enough  to  be  intelligent  on  all  the  rich 
comedie  humaine.  Taste  every  joy  of  life  that  can  be  felt  with  inno- 
cence. Be  in  thought,  word,  and  deed  just  as  full-blown  and  humanized 
as  possible.  Exploit  and  experience  the  whole  life  of  man  in  all  its 
modes,  tenses,  lights  and  shadows,  forms  and  fashions,  as  far  as  individ- 
ual limitations  permit,  regardless  of  the  childish  theories  that  would 
regulate  and  prescribe  our  conduct,  using  only  the  all-saving  wisdom 
that  is  justified  of  her  children.  See  the  world,  feel  all  its  fulness,  enter 
into  all  its  moods,  and  expand  personality  as  nearly  as  possible  to  the 
utmost  limits  of  the  race,  provided  we  keep  well  within  the  orbit  our 
nature  marks  out,  equally  mindful  of  the  two  poles  of  excess  and  defect. 
Do  not  dance  to  the  infantile  piping  of  those  who  prescribe  a  regimen 
in  which  either  pleasure  or  pain  unduly  predominates.  Be  neither 
optimist  nor  pessimist,  but  rather  both.  Between  the  truth  in  all 
creeds  do  not  conform  to  one  to  the  exclusion  of  others  and  leave  out 
the  sound  precepts  of  all  faiths,  parties,  classes,  practices.  Follow  all 
religions  that  have  any  core  of  righteousness,  and  avoid  a  life  of  pre- 
scription, for  life  is  green,  and  theory  old  and  gray.  This  parable 
seems  a  very  crude  exhortation  to  common  sense  in  the  conduct  of  life. 
There  is  often  more  philosophy  in  regulating  health  and  moods  than  in 
many-volumed  systems. 

4.  Again  (Matt,  viiig-ii;  Luke  xi:ii-i3),  What  father,  if  his  son 
ask  bread,  will  give  him  a  stone,  or  if  he  ask  for  a  fish  will  give  him  a 
serpent;  or,  Luke  adds,  if  he  ask  an  egg  will  he  give  him  a  scorpion? 
Thus,  if  you  being  evil  know  how  to  give  fit  gifts  to  your  children,  how 
much  better  does  the  heavenly  Father  know  how  to  give  fit  gifts  (Luke 
says  give  the  Holy  Spirit)  to  those  that  ask  him?  Just  before,  Jesus 
had  been  saying,  "  Ask  and  it  will  be  given,  knock  and  it  will  be  opened, 
seek  and  ye  shall  find."  Matthew  adds  next,  "All  things  therefore 
whatsoever  you  would  that  men  should  do  unto  you,  do  ye  even  so  to 
them,  for  this  is  the  law  and  the  prophets." 

Bread  loaves,  we  are  told,  then  looked  like  stones,  and  hence  the 
two  became  favourite  terms  of  contrast;  while  fish,  which  became  the 
t3TDe  symbol  of  Christianity,  is  the  diametrical  opposite  of  the  serpent, 
the  symbol  of  the  devil;  and  the  egg,  too,  means  fecundity,  while  the 


530  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

scorpion  stands  for  destruction.  Thus  it  is  predicating  little  of  a 
father's  love  to  say  that  he  will  not  answer  a  request  by  giving  the  very 
opposite  of  what  is  asked  for.  This  injunction  to  ask,  knock,  seek,  has 
been  perhaps  more  faithfully  followed  than  any  other  scriptural  behest. 
*'0  Lord,  give  me  something:  wealth,  health,  safety,  success,  victory, 
food,  raiment,  salvation,"  is  the  core  of  nearly  all  petitional  prayer. 
Every  wish  of  the  human  soul  has  taken  the  form  of  a  request  to  heaven. 
The  degree  to  which  Christianity  here  has  taken  Jesus  at  his  word  and 
accepted  his  invitation  to  ask  favours  has  often  become  nothing  less 
than  spiritual  begging  for  what  men  should  get  for  themselves.  In- 
deed, this  mendicant  chapter  constitutes  one  of  the  saddest  in  religious 
pathology.  "You  shall  have  whatever  you  ask"  suggests  the  carte- 
blanche  promise  of  a  friendly  despot  to  a  favourite,  or  a  gift  of  a  magic 
wishing-cap.  Indeed,  it  has  been  even  condemned  as  a  charlatan's  bid 
for  adherents.  It  contains,  however,  the  saving  implication  that 
petitions  may  not  be  answered  in  kind,  and  that  those  who  pray  will 
not  be  given  things  bad  for  them.  Luke  safeguards  the  unconditioned 
promise  by  intimating  that  those  who  pray  will  receive  the  Holy  Ghost, 
or  what  they  ask  for  in  its  spiritual  symboHc  form.  Thus  the  promised 
satisfaction  of  the  uttered  desire  is  qualified  by  God's  fatherly  discre- 
tion. Every  wish  breathed  heavenward  will  bring  some  response  from 
on  high,  or  at  least  is  reinforced  by  being  expressed,  so  that  its  utterance 
marks  a  step  toward  its  fulfilment.  If  we  know  what  we  want,  if  we 
try  to  get  it,  and  if  it  is  good  for  us,  we  shall  get  it. 

5.  "The  disciple  is  not  above  his  master  nor  the  servant  above  his 
lord"  (Matt.  x:24  f.;  Luke  vi:  40).  It  is  enough  that  the  former  be 
as  the  latter.  Luke  adds  that  every  man  that  is  perfect  shall  be  as 
his  master.  If  the  master  be  called  Beelzebub,  all  the  more  will  the 
disciples  have  to  bear  this  opprobrious  epithet.  The  pupil  does  not 
stand  higher  than  his  teacher.  It  is  enough  if  he  equals  him.  All 
who  are  perfect  should  be  teachers. 

This  parable  bears  on  the  jealousy  of  the  disciples  for  precedence, 
but  it  tells  us  clearly  in  its  gnomic  way  and  in  a  spirit  later  illustrated 
in  the  "Imitatio  ChrisH"  and  earlier  in  the  instinct  of  subordination 
taught  by  the  Stoic  Epictetus,  how  domineering  Jesus  was  both  by 
nature  and  by  necessity,  and  how  authoritative  he  regarded  his  office 
as  teacher.  When  enemies  insult,  the  master  must  bear  most,  but 
his  followers  will  have  to  endure  their  share  of  abuse. 

The  possible  allusions  or  "improvements"  in  this  pedagogic  com- 
plex are  so  many  that  one  wonders,  as  so  often,  whether  Jesus  himself 
saw  all  that  was  involved  or  was  led  to  it  by  his  genius,  which  was  wiser 


THE  PARABLES  OF  JESUS  531 

than  he  knew.  It  teaches  at  the  same  time  docility,  obedience,  the  need 
of  perfection  in  the  teacher,  the  duty  of  all  who  have  attained  it  to 
teach  and  to  rule.  It  warns  against  conceit,  prepares  the  soul  of  his 
followers  for  opprobrium,  inculcates  the  duty  of  every  subordinate  to 
equal  if  possible  whoever  is  over  him,  but  not  to  excite  his  enmity 
and  indignation  by  surpassing  him.  At  least  all  these  meanings  have 
been  extracted  out  of  or  read  into  the  passage.  Did  Jesus  intend  all 
this  muUum  in  parvo;  and  was  it  meant  to  teach  all  these  lessons,  or  to 
stress  some  one  or  more  of  them? 

6.  "If  the  blind  lead  the  blind,  both  shall  fall  into  the  ditch" 
(Matt.  xv:i4;  Luke  vi:39).  Cicero,  Plutarch,  Philo,  and  many  in 
modern  times,  have  used  this  concise  and  expressive  phrase.  Matthew 
premises,  "Every  plant  which  my  heavenly  father  hath  not  planted 
shall  be  rooted  up.  Let  them  alone :  they  be  blind  leaders  of  the  bhnd." 
In  both  Gospels  this  sentence  is  more  or  less  isolated  and  out  of  place. 
It  is  also  anti-Pharisaic. 

Leadership  in  thought  and  in  action  must  be  competent,  or  leader 
and  led  will  come  to  grief.  This  is  a  sound  common-sense  precept 
illustrated  in  every  sphere  of  life,  but  it  is  here  given  a  very  realistic 
and  almost  comic  metaphor  and  shows  Jesus'  talent  for  graphic  figura- 
tive phrase-making. 

7.  Calling  all  the  people,  he  said,  "Hear  and  understand  (Matt. 
xv:io-2o;  Mark  vii:i4-23);  not  that  which  goeth  into  the  mouth  de- 
fileth  a  man,  but  that  which  cometh  out  of  the  mouth,  this  defileth  a 
man."  And  then  he  adds  impressively  (Mark),  " If  any  man  have  ears 
to  hear,  let  him  hear."  When  asked  by  Peter  or  the  disciples  to  ex- 
plain, he  said.  Do  you  not  see  that  what  enters  into  the  mouth  does  not 
go  to  the  heart  but  to  the  belly  and  is  cast  out  at  the  draught?  But 
out  of  the  heart  come  evil  thoughts,  murder,  adultery,  theft,  covetous- 
ness,  blasphemy,  the  evil  eye,  pride,  folly,  and  false  witness,  etc.  These 
defile,  and  not  what  we  eat;  nor,  he  adds  (alluding  to  the  Pharisees 
who  were  displeased  at  this  saying),  does,  it  defile  to  eat  with  un- 
washed hands. 

A  unique  setting  is  given  this  saying  by  the  fact  that  Jesus  appears 
almost  to  convoke  his  audience  like  a  town  crier,  enjoins  them  to  make 
their  very  best  effort  at  comprehension,  as  if  something  very  cryptic 
and  significant  were  coming,  and  then  lays  down  a  general  principle 


532  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

in  a  single  sentence  and  is  done.  It  suggests  some  new  discovery. 
It  is  a  kind  of  challenge  to  the  understanding,  a  little  as  if  it  were  a 
riddle  or  dream  which  each  must  work  out  the  meaning  of  as  best  he 
can  for  himself.  It  impUes,  too,  a  ghnt  of  physiological  knowledge, 
always  so  significant  for  any  kind  of  psychology,  here  of  the  digestive 
tract  and  the  phenomena  of  defecation,  and  also  a  deep  insight  into 
the  psychology  of  the  feelings  and  impulses.  It  is  a  thrust  at  the 
distinction  so  sacred  to  the  Jews  between  clean  and  unclean  or  tabooed 
viands,  and  it  causes  the  resentment  of  the  Pharisees,  because  it  im- 
plies that  anything  nutritive  may  be  eaten  without  pollution.  The 
really  impure  things  are  sins,  all  of  which,  like  virtue,  spring  from  the 
heart,  the  Jons  et  origo  of  all  that  is  really  bad  or  good  because  it  is  the 
centre  of  the  life  of  the  soul.  Thus  the  mouth  is  the  excremental 
organ  of  thought,  feelings,  will,  and  desires,  which  spring  from  the 
heart.  To  make  the  contrast  complete  only  the  evil  that  escapes 
through  the  higher  function  of  the  mouth  in  speech,  which  is  super- 
posed upon  its  primal  function  of  eating,  should  be  included.  Yet 
deeds  proceed  from  the  heart  no  less  really  than  do  words.  To  adduce 
our  modern  conception  of  food  that  is  full  of  toxic  products  or  morbific 
germs  which  do  defile  would  be  to  go  beyond  the  scope  of  the  parable, 
although  the  Levitical  sumptuary  prescriptions  here  abrogated  are 
thought  to  have  been  originally  based  on  hygiene.  Neither  sacra- 
mental nor  common  food  makes  clean  or  unclean,  but  language,  which 
reveals  the  soul's  purity  or  vileness.  Evil  speech  is  worse  than  food 
ceremonially  unclean.  The  contagion  of  crime  is  mostly  oral.  The 
utterances  of  a  vile  soul  in  speech  are  a  veritable  sewer  against  the 
defilement  of  which  every  safeguard  is  inadequate.  The  foul  mouth 
corrupts  and  the  effect  of  its  utterance  is  true  pollution.  Moral 
hygiene  demands  the  repression  of  all  utterance  of  evil;  for  repression 
is  to  vice  as  oxygen  to  smouldering  fire,  which  dies  if  it  is  withheld. 
Elsewhere  bad  thoughts  are  condemned,  but  here  giving  them  language. 
We  have  two  voluminous  collections  of  popular  obscenities  pubHshed 
by  groups  of  anthropologists  respectively  in  Germany  and  France, 
and  their  precept  is  that,  if  sin  were  robbed  of  its  rank  vocabulary,  its 
sting  if  not  drawn  would  be  at  least  blunted.  This  is  sound  psycholog- 
ical ethics  and  emphasizes  an  important  item  in  the  regimen  of 
virtue. 

The  esoteric  explanation  of  this  parable,  or  fragment  of  a  parable, 
as  some  think  it,  is  plain  enough.  Assuming  the  soul  to  be  clean, 
nothing  external  working  inward  can  pollute  it.  What  really  degrades 
is  efferent  and  has  its  chief  seat  in  ejective  tracts.  This  chimes  very 
well  with  the  theory  of  the  efferent  nature  of  all  psychic  activity,  and 
here  for  the  ethics  of  the  present  and  the  future  is  opened  a  rich  quarry 
not  yet  adequately  worked.    We  have  a  new  criterion  of  value  that 


THE  PARABLES  OF  JESUS  533 

pragmatic  morality  should  amplify,  an  apperception  centre,  a  vital 
node  of  contemporary  pragmatism. 

8.  Salt  is  good  (Matt.  v:i3;  Mark  ix:49;  Luke  xiv:34),  but  if  the 
salt  becomes  stale  with  what  can  it  be  seasoned?  It  is  not  fit  for  land 
or  the  dunghill;  it  is  good  only  to  be  trodden  under  foot.  Matthew 
makes  Jesus  call  the  disciples  the  salt  of  the  earth.  He  tells  them  to 
have  salt  in  themselves,  and  says  they  shall  be  salted  with  fire  as  the 
sacrifice  is  with  salt. 

Salt  here  is  a  conservative  factor  rather  than  an  appetizer,  and  so 
is  in  fact  in  little  danger  of  losing  its  savour  as  is  implied.  E.  Jones^ 
has  taken  great  pains  to  prove  that  salt  in  folk-lore  has  a  predominant 
sexual  significance,  but  we  think  vainly,  and  there  is  certainly  no  such 
meaning  here.  Nor  does  this  metaphor  contemplate  the  destructive 
action  of  too  much  salt  upon  animal  and  vegetable  Ufe.  It  is  a  chemi- 
cal which  the  systems  of  animals  and  men  need  and  which  they  so 
crave  that  they  accept  many  substitutes  and  often  migrate  far  to  get  it. 
A  small,  quite  constant  percentage  of  it  is  as  essential  for  the  health 
of  Hving,  as  it  is  preservative  of  dead,  bodies.  To  be  called  "  the  salt 
of  the  earth"  is  one  of  the  highest  proverbial  commendations,  and  this 
is  in  Jesus'  sense.  Salt  keeps  the  sea  fresh,  and  this  trope  implies  that 
but  for  Christianity  the  world  would  putrefy.  But  we  must  not  forget 
that  a  parable  or  simile  pushed  too  far  loses  its  savour.  The  context 
suggests  that  if  the  disciples  lose  their  power  of  renunciation,  they  are 
degraded  from  a  noble,  precious,  preservative  element  to  dirt  and  mud 
underfoot.    Christianity  gives  life  a  new  zest  as  salt  appetizes  food. 

9.  A  candle  (Matt.  v:i4  f.;  Mark  iv:2i  f.;  Luke  viii:i7,  and  xi:33) 
is  not  put  under  a  bushel  or  a  bed,  or  in  a  secret  place,  but  on  a  candle- 
stick, that  aU  may  see;  so  your  light  must  shine  that  men  may  see  your 
good  works  and  glorify  the  Father.    You  are  the  light  of  the  world. 

Thus  the  disciples  are  told  that  they  practically  cure  from  bhnd- 
ness  all  who  see  by  their  Hght.  To  a  world  lying  in  darkness  they  re- 
peat the  marvel  of  the  creation  of  light.  The  admonition  is  against  the 
luxury  of  mere  self-illumination.  There  must  be  no  secret  cults  of 
truth.  No  repression  of  it  must  be  suffered,  but  it  must  be  given 
promulgation  and  insights  must  be  imparted.  Preaching  and  teaching 
of  the  very  best  that  is  in  them  must  be  with  abandon,  utterly  without 
reservations  from  prudential  or  any  other  motives.    Christianity  must 

>  "Die  Bedeutung  des  Salz  in  Sitte  und  Braucb  der  Vfilker."    Imago,  1913.    Bd.  i,  S.  361-85;  454-S8. 


534  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

mean  Aufkldrung,  eclaircissement,  as  indeed  it  always  has  brought 
enlightenment,  and  kindled  the  torch  of  culture  and  science,  and 
banished  spiritual  darkness.  Who  put  their  light  under  a  bushel? 
Those  who  have  intuitions  or  convictions  which  they  conceal;  those 
who  kindle  and  feed  the  flame  of  truth  in  esoteric  circles;  those  who 
refuse  to  promulgate  their  best  and  deepest  thought,  whether  from  some 
fear  of  odium  theologicum  or  current  orthodoxy,  or  diffidence  of  their 
own  powers,  or  sluggishness;  or  those  who  seek  to  monopolize  like  a 
trade  secret,  and  to  use  as  if  it  were  a  burglar's  dark  lantern,  the  knowl- 
edge that  others  have  a  right  to. 

Those  who  refuse  to  patent,  but  give  freely  to  the  public  their 
inventions  and  discoveries  and  refuse  all  monopolies  of  information  are 
observing  this  precept. 

10.  "A  city  set  on  a  hill  cannot  be  hid"  (Matt.  v:i4). 

According  to  the  early  allegorizing  interpretation,  the  city  is  the 
celestial  city  of  the  saints;  the  mountain  upon  the  solid  rocky  basis  of 
which  it  rests  is  Christ;  the  citizens  are  Church  members;  the  towers, 
prophets;  the  doors,  the  apostles;  the  walls,  the  priests  and  teachers. 
Pure  air,  solidity,  elevation  above  all  that  is  mundane,  and  all  manner 
of  symbolisms  which  have  been  woven  about  mountain  and  city,  have 
been  spim  about  this  passage.  Some  think  that  we  have  here  an 
apocryphal  prophecy  of  Zion's  rule  of  the  world;  others,  that  it  means 
that  the  light  of  truth  in  Christianity  cannot  be  hidden  but  will  in- 
evitably be  preached;  but  most  commentators  think  it  refers  to  the 
way  in  which  good  deeds  shine  far  in  a  naughty  world.  Jesus  tells  his 
followers  that  they  are  conspicuous  and  observed,  as  well  as  that  they 
live  on  the  altitudes  of  human  experience.  The  Kingdom  is  a  moun- 
tain city,  such  as  in  a  figurative  sense  was  the  heavenly  Jerusalem, 
and  such  as  the  Roman  Church  was  thought  to  be  on  earth.  Certain 
it  is  that  this  parable,  simple  as  it  is,  need  not  and  should  not  always 
have  one  unitary  and  consistent  explanation,  but  was  meant  to  be  a 
centre  from  which  irradiate  many  lessons  not  necessarily  consistent 
with  one  another. 

11.  There  is  nothing  hidden  which  shall  not  be  revealed  and 
nothing  secret  that  shall  not  be  manifest.  Then  follows.  What  I  tell 
you  in  darkness  or  privately,  that  speak  in  the  light  or  from  the  house- 
top (Matt,  x:  26  f.;  Mark  iv:  22;  Luke  viii:  1-7,  and  xi:  35  f.). 

This  is  a  Hebrew  gnome.  The  esoteric  shall  be  made  exoteric. 
Some  think  it  has  an  anti-gnostic  purport.  All  riddles  and  parables 
will  be  explained.    There  must  be  no  cloistered  or  concealed  knowl- 


THE  PARABLES  OF  JESUS  535 

edge.  Some  think  it  means  that  faith  will  attain  sight.  The  heart 
will  bear  its  fruit.  Things  secretly  guarded  in  the  breast  will  come  out. 
Bushels  will  be  taken  off  all  candles,  not  to  satisfy  prying  curiosity 
but  by  a  law  of  diffusion  and  popularization  of  true  science.  Here 
once  rested  the  dogma  of  the  perspicacity  of  the  Scriptures,  on  which 
so  much  exegesis  is  an  unconscious  satire.  But  this  passage  is  futur- 
istic and  prophetic,  suggesting  the  indefinite  progress  of  knowledge. 
Perhaps  here  Jesus  withdraws  or  cancels  all  his  injunctions  to  tell  no 
man.  Whatever  opposition  it  encounters  the  glad  Gospel  tidings  must 
be  proclaimed  with  no  reservations  and  no  vestige  of  timidity.  Not 
only  God  sees,  but  all  the  world  will  and  must. 

12.  The  light  of  the  body  is  the  eye  (Matt,  vi:  22  f.;  Luke  xi: 
34,  and  xxxii:  6).  If  the  eye  is  right,  the  body  is  full  of  light,  but  if  it 
is  bad,  of  darkness.  No  part  of  the  body  must  be  dark.  The  Hght  in 
us  must  not  be  darkness,  which  is  great  if  it  is  a  darkness  made  out  of 
light. 

This  is  one  of  the  most  difficult  of  all  Jesus'  sayings,  and  volumi- 
nous and  divergent  have  been  the  interpretations  of  it.  Liberal  com- 
mentators think  it  shows  a  muddled  knowledge  of  optics  and  repre- 
sents views  that  are  utterly  antiquated.  JtiUcher,  after  epitomizing 
many  other  views,  concludes  that  it  is  "an  admonition  to  care  faith- 
fully for  that  which  is  as  indispensable  for  the  spiritual  as  the  eye  is  for 
the  corporeal  fife,"  and  thinks  its  purport  akin  to  that  of  the  parable 
of  the  salt  of  the  earth  which  had  lost  its  savour.  He  seems  to  think 
that  Jesus  regarded  the  eye  for  the  purpose  of  illuminating  the  whole 
body,  so  that  any  defect  involved  obscurity  in  some  part  of  the  body — 
a  view  nowhere  found  in  antiquity,  and  as  false  as  the  very  widespread 
and  persistent  view,  till  Harvey,  that  air  entered  the  lungs  and  through 
them  the  arteries  (air  passages),  and  thence  pervaded  the  whole  body. 
Even  if  Jesus  anticipated  the  modern  experiments  which  show  that  ret- 
inal stimuli  tone  up  all  the  bodily  functions  and  accelerate  every 
physiological  process,  while  binding  or  extirpating  the  eyes  puts  many 
animals  to  sleep,  this  might  help.  Was  he  groping  toward  something 
he  did  not  fully  comprehend?  Does  it  suggest,  like  many  other  of  his 
sayings,  a  proclivity  toward  physiological  psychology  on  Jesus'  part, 
crude  and  ignorant  but  rightly  oriented  in  the  very  direction  in  which 
that  important  science  has  recently  developed?  May  we  psycho- 
analyze some  of  the  parables,  and  throwing  history  and  criticism  to  the 
winds,  read  modern  meanings  into  them?  If  so,  possibly  we  have  here 
a  prelusive  adumbration  of  Wundt's  chief  contribution  to  psychology, 
viz.,  that  optical  perception  is  the  key  to  apperception,  and  that  in  the 


'S36  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

distinction  between  Blichpunkt  and  Blickfeld  we  find  an  open  door  to 
the  comprehension  of  the  direct  and  indirect  field  of  consciousness, 
so  that  the  mind  is  in  a  sense  made  largely  on  the  pattern  of  the  eye, 
and  this  sense  is  the  best  analogue  of  its  mode  of  action.  We  must  not 
forget  that  in  many  passages  Jesus  used  seeing  symbolically,  and  that 
the  new  insights  he  brought  into  the  world  were  conveyed  to  us  under 
the  analogy  of  restoring  sight  to  the  bHnd.  At  least  he  means  that 
ignorance  leaves  the  soul  in  darkness  as  optical  opacity  leaves  the  body 
inert  and  without  the  power  of  self-direction.  The  symbolization  of 
light  through  all  the  ages  has  been  too  complex  to  be  exhaustively 
treated.  Until  this  is  done  this  passage  will  have  to  remain  one  of  the 
"dark  sayings." 

13.  No  one,  or  no  servant,  can  serve  two  masters  (Matt,  vi:  24  f., 
Luke  xvi:  13).  One  will  be  loved  and  cleaved  to  and  the  other  hated 
and  despised.  Thus  no  one  can  serve  God  and  Mammon,  the  god  of 
ill-gotten  wealth. 

This  reminds  us,  of  course,  of  the  treasure  laid  up  in  heaven  and  the 
camel  in  the  needle's  eye.  It  seems  a  popular  proverb  utilized  for  Jesus' 
present  purpose.  Some  expositors  assume  that  the  two  masters  are  hos- 
tile, which  would  make  the  task  of  serving  them  both  more  difficult. 
The  slave  cannot  possibly  be  indifferent  and  so  far  as  he  is  inclined  to 
prefer  one  master  he  will  grow  averse  to  the  other.  But  there  should  be 
no  duplicity,  no  vacillating  policy,  no  hypocrisy  or  reservations.  Ser- 
vice should  be  complete  and  single.  The  claims  of  the  two  masters  are 
not  only  divergent  but  contradictory.  There  might  conceivably  be  al- 
ternation, serving  of  now  one  and  now  the  other  master,  like  doing  the 
will  of  God  on  Sunday  and  serving  Mammon  the  other  days  of  the  week. 
We  must  have  one  supreme  goal  in  life,  and  not  two  or  more,  which 
would  be  worse  yet.  If  one  master  were  served  in  a  way  and  at  a  time 
displeasing  to  the  other,  the  neglected  master  would,  of  course,  be  in- 
censed. Thus  life,  as  in  the  preceding  verse  we  are  told  the  eye,  must 
be  single. 

14.  Men,  like  trees,  are  known  by  their  fruits.  Good  men  bear 
good,  bad  men  bear  evil  fruit  (Matt,  vii:  16-20;  Luke  vi:  43-6).  A 
good  tree  cannot  bear  bad,  nor  a  corrupt  tree  good,  fruit. 

This  is  connected  with  the  warning  against  false  prophets  in 
sheep's  clothing  who  are  inwardly  ravening  wolves.  Luke  adds  that 
men  do  not  gather  figs  of  thorns  or  grapes  of  thistles.  A  good  man 
out  of  the  good  treasure  of  his  heart  brings  forth  that  which  is  good, 


THE  PARABLES  OF  JESUS  537 

an  evil  man  that  which  is  evil;  for  the  mouth  speaks  out  of  the  abun- 
dance of  the  heart.  Unfruitfulness  is  a  sure  sign  of  false  piety  and 
doctrine,  and  this  is  vaHd  of  false  prophets. 

This  seems  like  modern  pragmatism.  Good  works  are  the  best 
indications  of  sound  doctrine,  and  every  error  produces  bad  conduct. 
A  wolf  clothed  with  a  sheep's  skin  is  like  thistles  bearing  figs,  and  both 
are  impostors  or  hypocrites.  A  really  good  heart  cannot  produce  bad 
deeds.  Acts  speak  louder  than  words.  As  each  plant  breeds  true  to 
its  species,  so  the  good  or  the  bad  man  lives  out  his  hfe  according  to 
his  inmost  nature.  Fruit  there  must  be,  yet  the  warning  against  false 
prophets  impHes  that  men  may  seem  but  not  be  good,  although  to  true 
discernment  each  is  sure  to  betray  himself.  A  morbid  complex,  evil 
or  good  desires,  inevitably  find  a  vent,  and  all  disguise  and  pretense 
are  ineffective  to  prevent  it.  Only  in  a  double  life,  which  is  against 
nature,  is  it  possible  for  thorns  to  bear  grapes. 

15.  Every  scribe  instructed  in  the  kingdom  of  heaven  (Matt, 
xiii:  52)  is  like  a  householder  bringing  forth  from  his  treasure  things 
new  and  old. 

This  comes  at  the  close  of  a  long  pericope  of  parables,  and  after 
Jesus  had  asked  the  disciples  if  they  had  understood  and  they  had  an- 
swered. This  seems  to  say  that  a  Jew  who  understands  Jesus'  teaching 
of  the  Kingdom,  and,  as  did  the  disciples,  combines  a  knowledge  of  the 
Old  Testament  and  the  new  message  of  Jesus,  is  like  one  who  brings 
forth  from  a  richly  furnished  family  store-room  what  is  most  needful 
for  each  member  of  the  household.  There  is  always  the  impUcation 
that  the  old  must  not  be  forgotten  for  the  new,  as  neologists  are  prone 
to  do.  Kostlin  thinks  Jesus  here  is  recommending  to  the  disciples  his 
own  mode  of  teaching  by  parables,  which  combines  the  recondite  and 
the  famiUar.  Would  that  we  could  think  he  meant  to  commend  the 
genetic  method  that  understands  the  new  only  in  the  light  of  the 
old  and  vice  versa  in  the  sense  of  modern  evolution!  This  would 
be  putting  new  wine  into  old  bottles,  which  he  is  reported  on  authority 
that  some  have  challenged  to  have  said  elsewhere  no  man  does.  Yet 
in  the  Umited  sense  that  stands  for  the  most  striking  of  all  religious 
evolutions,  viz.,  that  of  the  New  Testament  developing  out  of  the  Old, 
in  which  it  lay  concealed,  Jesus  was  facile  princeps  of  cultural  evolution- 
ism. If  we  can  only  be  progressive  and  at  the  same  time  conservative, 
or  even  as  a  member  of  either  party  recognize  the  necessary  function 
of  the  other,  we  shall  be  strong.  To  be  devotees  of  the  past  or  of  the 
future  is,  like  all  extreme  positions,  easiest  but  least  effective.  Paul 
perhaps  was  the  best  of  all  illustrations  of  this  parablette,  being  well 
tramed  in  the  learning  of  the  scribes  and  also  a  Christian. 


538  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

1 6.  Where  the  carcass  is  there  the  eagles  gather  (Matt,  xxiv: 
28;  Luke  xvii:  37). 

In  Luke  this  is  said  in  answer  to  the  question  apropos  of  Jesus' 
statement  that  two  will  be  in  one  bed,  two  grinding  together,  two  in  the 
field,  and  one  will  be  taken  and  the  other  left.  In  Matthew  it  ap- 
pears in  the  midst  of  a  description  of  the  advent  of  the  last  day.  It  is 
one  of  the  most  current  proverbial,  if  somewhat  repulsive  and  difficult, 
of  the  parables,  brief  as  it  is.  The  terrible  side  of  the  parousia  will  ap- 
pear wherever  there  is  an  object  of  judgment,  Jewish  or  heathen.  Sin 
draws  a  penalty  as  carrion  does  birds  of  prey.  It  can  hardly  mean,  as 
has  been  said,  that  the  Messiah  will  as  surely  find  his  own  as  vultures 
find  a  carcass,  or  that  retribution  will  overtake  those  dead  and  rotten 
with  sin,  or  that  Satan  is  the  eagle  preying  upon  his  victim.  Why  not 
take  it  in  the  double  sense,  viz.,  that  virtue  will  as  surely  find  its  reward 
and  sin  its  penalty  as  a  mouldering  dead  body  will  draw  to  it  all  those 
creatures  that  naturally  feed  upon  it?  Iniquity  draws  social  and 
physical  convulsions.  Vengeance  is  waiting  l&e  birds  of  prey.  The 
Hebrew  mind  was  peculiarly  prone,  if  disaster  came,  to  interpret  it  as 
a  punishment  for  sin  and  to  search  its  own  heart  for  the  real  cause. 
Jesus  here  says:  "Given  these  calamities  that  I  have  described,  and 
you  can  be  as  certain  that  there  is  a  commensurate  sin  as  you  are 
when  you  see  a  flock  of  carrion  birds  gathering  that  there  is  a  carcass 
somewhere  attracting  them." 

17.  If  a  good  householder  knows  when  a  thief  is  coming  he  will 
watch  and  prevent  the  burglary  (Matt,  xxiv:  43;  Luke  xii:  39).  The 
context  both  before  and  after  in  both  Gospels  is:  Be  ready  for  the 
coming  of  the  Son  of  Man,  who  will  arrive  stealthily  as  a  housebreaker. 
Here  the  time,  as  in  the  preceding  parable  the  place,  is  stressed. 
The  injunction  is:  Watch,  for  you  know  not  the  day  or  the  hour,  so 
that  this  is  another  semper  paratus  warning.  The  parousia  will  come 
when  it  is  least  expected. 

Many  expositors  make  the  householder  deaf,  some  refer  to  Hol- 
bein's stealthy  dance  of  approach,  while  others  think  the  thief  is  the 
devil,  always  striving  to  outwit  and  pilfer  away  souls.  But  if  we 
watch  we  prevent  the  theft.  BeHevers  welcome  the  coming  of  the 
Son  who  gives  rather  than  takes  away  from  them.  The  advent,  too, 
will  be  soon,  although  it  is  undatable,  and  no  one  must  be  caught  nap- 
ping. Not  only  is  the  time  short,  but  it  mil  probably  secretly  be  set 
at  just  that  time  when  most  will  be  off  their  guard.  Thus  the  disciples 
have  the  double  advantage  of  knowing  this  and  also  knowing  that 


THE  PARABLES  OF  JESUS  539 

it  will  come  soon.  He  who  takes  your  soul  will  seek  to  surprise  you, 
and  you  must  strive  to  prevent  him  from  taking  you  unawares.  Me- 
mento semper  mori.  Never  for  an  instant  forget  that  you  must  die, 
and  may  die  at  any  time.  Always  have  preparations  complete. 
Thanatophobia,  which  has  inspired  medicine,  hygiene,  and  even  the 
conceptions  of  another  hfe,  has  indeed  been  a  great  muse,  and  here  we 
are  enjoined  to  live  as  if  every  day,  hour,  and  minute  would  be  our 
last.  Or  does  it  all  concern  the  coming  of  another  order  of  things  in 
this  world  without  death?  With  the  indeterminate  characterization 
of  other  parables  is  it  meant  to  have  multifarious  suggestiveness? 

18.  Blessed  is  the  faithful  and  wise  servant  whom  his  lord  made 
ruler  over  his  household  (Matt,  xxiv:  45-51 ;  Luke  xii:  41-48),  and  who 
gives  to  all  their  meat  in  due  season,  and  is  found  so  doing  when  the  lord 
comes.  He  will  be  made  ruler  of  all.  But  if  because  the  lord  delays 
his  coming  he  smites  his  fellows  and  becomes  drunken  and  gluttonous, 
to  him  the  lord  will  come  when  least  expected,  will  cut  him  asunder 
and  send  him  among  hypocrites  where  there  will  be  weeping  and  gnash- 
ing of  teeth.  Luke  adds  that  the  servant  that  knows  his  lord's  will 
and  does  it  not  shall  be  beaten  with  many  stripes,  but  he  who  knows 
it  not  shall  receive  but  few  stripes,  for  to  whom  much  is  given  of  him 
will  much  be  required. 

Here  the  admonition  is  to  the  virtue  of  loyalty  in  the  large  sense 
of  Royce  and  the  Japanese.  Personal  fealty  and  at  the  same  time 
fidelity  to  a  trust  are  commended,  and  also  by  implication  fiduciary 
responsibility  and  duty  done  independently  of  supervision.  There  is 
a  saving  gradation  of  demerit  because  those  who  do  not  know  are 
beaten  less  than  those  who  violate  their  trust  after  being  duly  instructed 
in  it.  All  are  servants,  representatives,  with  only  delegated  power, 
or  at  best  vicegerents  holding  and  administering  what  is  committed 
to  them  in  trust  for  a  feudal  lord.  Heavy  indeed  will  be  the  penalty 
for  those  found  false.  As  time  goes  by  those  who  are  not  true  will 
begin  to  act,  not  as  vicariates  or  attendants,  but  as  owners,  and  will 
abuse  theh:  power,  as  other  parables  show;  but  that  is  just  the  moment 
the  absentee  landlord  will  select  to  arrive.  Good  stewardship  with 
few  specific  instructions,  tenancy  with  an  indeterminate  lease,  and 
utter  loyalty  to  the  employer,  though  he  be  an  absentee,  are  required 
on  pain  of  cruel  and  barbaric  torture. 

Had,  then,  Jesus  no  trust  in  his  followers  or  in  human  nature, 
that  he  felt  it  needful  so  often  to  hold  out  rewards  and  utter  threats 
of  direst  punishment?    Had  he  so  httle  faith  in  men  that  he  could 


540  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

not  depend  upon  their  fidelity  to  him  and  had  to  make  the  strongest 
appeal  he  could  possibly  devise  to  fear  and  hope?  The  Stoic  made 
virtue  its  own  reward  and  vice  its  own  penalty,  but  in  Jesus'  sayings 
there  are  very  few  traces  of  this.  Even  in  the  beatitudes  each  trait 
commended  is  given  a  prize.  All  are  paid  or  penalized  in  natural 
or  spiritual  coin.  Save  only  in  Parable  Two,  there  is  no  glint  of  a 
service  of  love  alone ;  but  rather  that  of  servile  duty  is  enjoined.  Is  it 
not  as  if  virtue  and  happiness,  sin  and  misery,  did  not  intrinsically 
belong  together,  but  must  be  brought  together  by  an  extraneous  sov- 
ereign will,  without  whose  intervention  they  would  rarely  and  only 
fortuitously  find  each  other?  There  is  much  in  Jesus'  sayings  that 
aknost  seems  to  anticipate  the  modern  doctrine  of  temibility,  or  the 
principle  that  a  certain  degree  of  pain,  measurable  for  each  individual 
and  for  each  sin,  would  be  an  adequate  deterrent. 

19.  Keep  your  loins  girded  and  your  lights  burning  (Mark  xiii: 
33-37;  Luke  xii:  35-38).  Wait  like  servants,  ready  to  open  on  the 
instant  when  the  master,  coming  home  from  a  wedding,  knocks.  Such 
servants  he  will  make  sit  down  at  his  table,  and  will  gird  himself  and 
serve  them.  Blessed  are  they  who  are  found  thus  waiting,  at  whatever 
watch  of  the  night  the  lord  comes.  In  Mark  the  lord  had  gone  on  a 
journey,  having  assigned  to  each  servant  his  duty  and  having  charged 
the  porter  to  watch  his  return.  He  will  come  suddenly,  and  must  not 
find  any  one  sleeping.  All  must  watch.  He  must  not  be  kept  waiting, 
or  knock  a  second  time. 

Godet  says  that  the  lord  is  supposed  to  have  come  home  so  sated 
from  a  wedding  feast  that  he  cared  not  himself  to  partake  of  the  meal 
the  servants  had  ready  for  him,  and  as  a  reward  for  their  promptness 
and  punctuality  divided  it  among  and  served  it  to  them,  in  the  same 
spirit  of  humility  as  Jesus  washed  his  disciples'  feet.  Thus  in  the 
Roman  saturnalia  the  master  became  servant  and  the  servant  master. 
Thus  Jesus  served  the  viands  at  his  Last  Supper.  The  coming  of  the 
Lord,  some  think,  refers  to  the  parousia,  others  to  the  hour  of  death 
as  it  comes  to  the  individual.  Some  see  in  it  an  exhortation  to  die 
fully  conscious  and  thus  to  receive  the  Lord.  If  the  parousia  is 
meant,  it  is  also  implied  that  it  may  be  delayed  longer  than  was 
expected.  But  the  Lord  will  surely  come  again,  and  it  will  be  in  judg- 
ment, and  of  this  great  assize  all  the  faithful  must  be  ever  mindful. 
No  one  knows  the  hour,  not  even  the  Son,  but  it  wiU  be  by  night  when 
most  sleep.  Hence  the  old  charge  to  be  always  ready,  expectant,  at- 
tentive, with  lamps  lighted  and  with  sufficient  oil  in  them,  to  observe 


THE  PARABLES  OF  JESUS  541 

keenly  the  signs  of  the  great  advent,  listen  for  the  knock  at  the  door, 
and  open  immediately;  be  ever  alert,  watchful,  waiting  all  through 
the  night  for  the  great  home-coming. 

20.  Jesus  quotes  the  proverb,  "Physician,  heal  thyself"  (Luke  iV: 
23),  after  he  had  charmed  the  attendance  at  the  synagogue  at  Nazareth, 
had  been  identified  as  Joseph's  son,  and  had  been  asked  but  was 
declining  to  do  miracles  here  as  he  was  said  to  have  done  in  Capernaum, 
because  no  prophet  is  accepted  in  his  own  country. 

"Physician,  heal  thyself"  is  the  shortest  of  the  parables,  but  it  is 
set  in  an  illuminatmg  pericope.  If  he  did  no  miracles  here  he  would 
be  like  a  physician  that  could  not  heal  himself.  His  repute  at  his 
boyhood  home  waned  when  he  was  recognized,  and  he  was  invited 
to  heal  his  reputation  by  a  miracle  done  on  the  spot.  Otherwise  he 
would  be  like  a  doctor  smitten  by  the  disease  he  had  made  it  his 
specialty  to  prevent  and  cure.  The  call  to  show  what  he  could  do  here 
has  suggested  to  some  the  taunt  on  the  cross,  Thou  that  doest  mighty 
things,  save  thyself  and  come  down  from  the  cross.  Plato  thought  a 
physician  must  have  experience  with  illness  in  his  own  person  to  be 
sympathetic  and  efiicient  with  his  patients;  but  we  are  not  told  that 
Jesus  was  ever  ill,  not  even  amidst  his  greatest  trials.  Those  about  to 
be  executed  must  sometimes  be  carried,  but  he  carried  his  own  cross. 
If  we  look  at  his  life  as  a  whole,  he  did  perhaps  save  his  repute  as  a 
healer  of  souls  by  doing  what  were  thought  to  be  miracles  of  bodily 
heaUng.  Luke's  form  of  statement  suggests  imperfect  comprehension 
on  his  part. 

21.  They  that  are  whole  (Matt,  ix:  12;  Mark  ii:  17;  Luke  v:  21  f.) 
need  not  a  physician,  but  they  that  are  sick.  Jesus  says  that  he  was 
come  to  call  not  the  righteous  but  sinners  to  repentance.  Matthew 
adds  an  injunction  to  learn  the  meaning  of  the  phrase,  "I  will  have 
mercy  and  not  sacrifice."  Luke  gives  this  saying  in  answer  to  the 
question  why  (at  Levi's  feast)  Jesus  and  his  disciples  ate  with  publicans 
and  sinners. 

Here  Jesus  appears  as  a  moral  psychiatrist  associating  with  those 
whom  rigorists  thought  depraved  and  so  held  aloof  from.  His  attitude 
is  not  that  of  modern  social  workers  who  say  they  are  studying  condi- 
tions to  devise  ethical  and  hygienic  reform,  although  he  could  hardly 
help  doing  this;  but  he  is  rather  comparing  himself  to  a  doctor  visiting 
quarantine  quarters  to  help  his  patients.    Missionary  work  has  only 


542  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

lately  taken  on  again  a  largely  medicinal  and  hygienic  character.  The 
early  Church  gradually  abandoned  its  healing  function  when  the  old 
psychotherapy  with  which  it  began  was  discredited.  Thus  this  parable 
proverb  has  new  significance  to-day.  This,  however,  is  not  the  core  of 
meaning.  It  is  more  akin  to  that  of  the  lost  sheep  and  the  prodigal. 
Those  whom  his  questioners  thought  righteous  he  felt  were  in  peculiar 
need  of  salvation,  so  this  saying  is  rather  a  retort  or  confutation  in 
justification  of  his  latitudinarianism.  Perhaps  it  shows  how  he  re- 
garded the  power  of  conversion  as  later  exemplified  in  Paul  and  August- 
ine, and  in  the  case  of  the  devotion  of  Mary  Magdalene,  so  often  before 
him.  Thus  he  doubtless  realized  that  those  who  had  gone  wrong  and 
been  set  right  were  the  most  active  elements  in  the  new  life;  for  there 
is  a  point  of  view  from  which  it  is  better  to  have  sinned  and  been 
rescued  than  never  to  have  sinned  at  all,  as  Kierkegaard  has  shown. 
At  any  rate,  this  sketch  brings  out  the  contrast  between  the  native, 
naive  Parsifal  innocence  and  impeccable  virtue,  illustrated  by  Jesus 
himself,  and  those  snatched  like  brands  from  the  burning,  and  implies 
that  he,  unhke  his  interrogators,  did  not  need  to  be  so  careful  of  the 
company  he  kept,  because  he  was  in  less  danger  of  being  infected  or 
tempted  than  they.  His  work  of  mercy  was  more  pleasing  to  God 
than  were  sacrifices.  His  attitude  is  corrective  compassion  to  those 
whom  narrow  legalism  had  outlawed.  Sinners  like  those  of  this  feast 
to  whom  exception  was  taken  were  interesting  "cases,"  patients  he 
yearned  to  save,  and  he  would  not  be  kept  or  called  away  from  them. 

22.  The  disciples  of  John  and  the  Pharisees  were  wont  to  fast 
(Mark  ii:  18-20;  Matt,  ix:  14  f.;  Luke  v.:  23-25).  When  Jesus  is  asked 
why  his  disciples  do  not  do  so  he  replies  that  they  have  the  bridegroom 
with  them,  but  that  the  time  for  them  to  fast  will  be  when  he  is  taken 
away. 

In  this  debate  Pharisaic  purism  adduces  the  Baptist's  example 
against  Jesus'  more  liberal  views  of  the  conduct  of  life.  He  sees  the 
device  that  might  involve  an  issue  between  himself  and  John's  fol- 
lowers but  avoids  it,  urging  that  those  within  are  celebrating  high 
festival  so  long  as  he  is  with  them,  and  that  this  is  no  time  for  legalism, 
funereal  mourning,  or  ascetism.  Fasting  is  out  of  place  in  the  presence 
of  the  Lord  of  life.  Stern  Ebionitic  pietism  would  be  an  anachronism 
now.  A  temperate  euphoric  abandon  is  in  order.  A  bridegroom 
ought  to  be  the  happiest  of  men,  and  should  irradiate  joy.  Here 
again  we  have  the  ecstatic  motive.  The  soul  just  wedded  to  Jesus 
is  transcendentally  joyful,  as  the  objective  studies  of  those  newly  wedded 
to  Jesus  in  Starbuck,  James,  Leuba,  and  others  show.    Fasting  has  its 


THE  PARABLES  OF  JESUS  543 

important  place  and  function  in  medicine,  religion,  physiology,  and 
hygiene;  but  very  likely  had  the  Baptist  himself  been  present  and 
fully  understood  that  Jesus  was  in  very  deed  the  Messiah  whom  he 
heralded,  he  would  have  cast  off  his  abstemiousness  and  realized  the 
double  joy  that  folklore  and  custom  have  always  assigned  to  banquets 
and  to  weddings.  Exhilaration,  elation,  elevation,  and  euphoria  of 
soul,  anticipating  the  moods  of  the  heavenly  marriage-supper  with 
the  Lamb,  are  here  sanctioned. 

23.  No  one  sews  new  cloth  on  an  old  garment,  for  this  makes  the 
rent  worse  (Matt,  ix:  16  f.;  Mark  ii:  21  f.;  Luke  v:  36-39).  Luke  adds 
that  the  new  piece  does  not  match  the  old.  No  one  puts  new  wine 
into  old  bottles  lest  the  bottles  break  and  the  wine  be  spilled  and  the 
bottles  spoiled,  but  new  wine  must  go  into  new  bottles  and  then  both 
are  preserved. 

This  parable  has  had  a  very  checkered  history.  The  old  bottles 
and  old  garment  have  been  interpreted  as  the  Pharisees'  cleaving  to 
the  old,  as  all  under  the  old  covenant,  as  the  disciples  of  the  Baptist, 
as  Jesus'  weak  and  callow  disciples,  and  as  old  institutions,  views  and 
customs  generally,  while  the  new  cloth  and  wine  have  been  thought 
to  mean  the  new  joy  and  freedom  Jesus  brought,  the  new  covenant  and 
doctrine,  the  ecstatic  state  of  mind  brought  by  the  Gospels,  aggressive 
policies,  new  institutions,  discoveries,  etc.  Many  writers  think  both 
comparisons  relate  fundamentally  to  the  relations  between  the  New 
and  the  Old  Testament,  or  the  new  life  of  Christ  and  the  old  one  of  sin 
while  some  think  all  relations  between  the  old  and  the  new  in  every 
domain  of  Ufe  are  here  alluded  to.  Many  find  here  an  admonition  to 
break  with  the  old,  and  come  out.  Reformers  should  not  consort  with 
but  cut  away  from  the  old,  as  Paul  did,  and  as  he  would  abrogate  the 
law.  The  passage  is  generally  thought  to  be  out  of  place  in  Mark, 
and  some  regard  it  as  a  fragment  of  a  larger  but  lost  discourse  of  Jesus. 
This  impression  that  we  are  deahng  with  older  fragments  patch-worked 
together  without  regard  for  matching,  which  Luke  alone  refers  to,  is 
often  felt.  But  the  gravamen  here  is  in  the  contrast  between  the  old 
and  the  new,  and  it  shows  Jesus  as  a  catastrophist  rather  than  as  a 
uniformitarian.  He  was  temperamentally  disposed  toward  breaks, 
crises,  epochs.  He  would  have  had  more  sympathy,  if  we  can  judge 
by  this  passage  alone,  with  the  French  revolution,  that  swept  all  that 
was  old  away  and  organized  everything  anew,  than  with  the  English 
way  of  making  history,  where  everything  widens  on  from  precedent  to 
precedent,  and  so  much  of  the  old  is  conserved  in  the  new  and  so  much 
of  the  new  is  cast  into  the  forms  of  the  old.    The  parable  is  so  anti- 


544  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

evolutionary,  too,  that  some  have  hoped  it  was  not  authentic.  The 
Catholic  Church  in  absorbing  the  barbarians  of  early  Europe  achieved 
its  greatest  successes  by  putting  new  meanings  into  old  forms,  and 
changing  and  adapting,  rather  than  throwing  away,  most  that  it  found 
at  hand.  The  same  principle  appHes  to  the  successful  Protestant 
minister,  to  the  pedagogue,  and  to  reformers  generally.  Do  not  all 
leaders  do  just  what  Jesus  here  says  no  one  does?  How  many  are  now 
engaged  in  putting  new  wine  and  meaning  into  the  old  bottles  of 
Christianity,  and  thus  conserving  both  at  the  same  time?  Even  con- 
version may  come  as  gradually  as  growth,  and  be  dateless. 

24.  Who,  intending  to  build  a  house,  does  not  sit  down  and  count 
the  cost  to  see  if  he  has  enough  to  finish  it,  lest  having  laid  the  founda- 
tion, observers  mock  and  say,  "Here  was  one  who  began  to  build  but 
was  not  able  to  finish"  (Luke  xiv:  28-33)?  C)r  what  king,  going  to 
war,  does  not  first  sit  down  and  consider  whether  with  ten  thousand 
he  will  meet  an  enemy  with  twenty  thousand  troops,  and  then  have 
to  beg  terms  of  peace?  Whoso  does  not  forsake  all  cannot  be  my 
disciple. 

This  is  a  paradigm  of  ordinary  economic  world  wisdom  applied  to 
the  Kingdom  which  it  costs  so  much  to  enter.  Do  not  join  the  Church, 
take  any  vow,  as  of  a  monk  or  nun,  swear  any  fraternity  or  sodality 
oath  that  you  have  not  fully  reahzed  the  obligations  of  and  estimated 
your  moral  ability  to  keep,  etc.  The  motive  for  the  prudence  here 
adduced  is  fear  of  ridicule.  It  has  a  pregnant  sense  for  promoters  of 
enterprises,  and  its  need  is  seen  in  failures  in  business  (more  than  ten 
thousand  a  year  in  this  country),  in  organizations,  societies,  etc.,  for  all 
varieties  of  good  purposes.  Confucius  repeatedly  gave  the  same  ad- 
monition in  other  terms.  Jesus  felt  it,  for  he  had  counted  the  cost  of 
his  own  perilous  career,  perhaps  was  doing  so  throughout  the  tempta- 
tions of  the  desert.  His  modern  enemies,  and,  indeed,  some  of  his 
friends,  like  Renan,  think  he  made  a  fatal  error  in  his  calculations  of 
what  he  could  and  could  not  carry  through,  and  lost  his  life  because 
he  attempted  too  much.  This  is  also  one  theme  in  the  modern  efii- 
ciency  movement.  Every  dictionary  of  proverbs,  too,  shows  that  all 
people  have  popular  sayings  to  this  effect,  and  not  only  is  prudence 
in  this  respect  rated  high,  but  failure  to  count  the  cost  brings  mis- 
fortunes that  are  the  chief  theme  of  satire  and  ridicule.  To  begin 
only  what  we  can  finish  is  a  kind  of  everyday,  Ben  Franklin-,  Tupper- 
like,  proverbial  philosophy,  desperate  though  the  enterprise  here 
typified  is.  It  means  abandonment  to  a  love  so  intense  that  family 
love  is  hate  beside  it,  just  as  ice  itself  is  hot  compared  to  the  lowest 


THE  PARABLES  OF  JESUS  545 

artificial  temperature  of  thousands  of  degrees  that  physics  is  now  able 
to  produce. 

Few  intellects  can  compute  in  advance  all  the  cost  involved  in 
choosing  such  a  course,  and  this  characteristic  utterance  of  Jesus  is 
well  calculated  to  warn  all  men  of  ordinary  mettle  from  attempting 
to  lead  his  life.  Its  intrinsic  difficulty  makes  it  seem  superhuman; 
for  the  context  in  the  Hght  of  which  this  parable  is  to  be  interpreted  is 
that  no  man  can  become  a  full  disciple  who  does  not  forsake  all,  hate 
father,  mother,  wife,  children,  brethren,  and  even  his  own  fife,  and  bear 
the  cross.  We  had  better  not  try  if  we  are  not  confident  of  the  power 
to  finish.  If  the  head  is  weak,  or  the  eye,  or  the  heart  fails,  miscarriage 
is  inevitable,  sooner  or  later.  The  natural  affections  must  actually 
be  martyred.  Thus  Jesus  certainly  cannot  be  said  to  cajole,  wheedle, 
or  seduce.  The  hardihood  of  accepting  his  call  would  seem  to  require 
less  intellect  than  what  the  world  calls  fanaticism.  Nor  does  the 
context  comport  with  a  moral  injunction  to  love  all  men,  even  our 
enemies;  but  here  again  we  must  recognize  Jesus'  tropical  and  per- 
fervid  nature,  which  scorns  quahfication,  comparison,  or  balancing 
modulated  statements.  For  these  his  heart  was  too  hot,  his  mind  too 
sharply  focussed  on  the  single  point  in  hand,  and  so  he  often  fails  to 
consider  the  relations  of  what  he  says  to  other  truths,  trusting  the 
deeper  unity  of  his  own  soul  rather  than  relying  on  the  superficial  imity 
of  doctrine  or  logic. 

25.  When  the  scribes  said  he  had  Beelzebub  and  cast  out  devils 
by  the  prince  of  devils  (Mark  iii:  22-27;  Matt,  xii:  24-30;  Luke  xi: 
14-26),  Jesus  answered  by  a  parable,  viz.,  how  can  Satan  cast  out 
Satan?  A  kingdom  or  a  house  divided  against  itself  cannot  stand. 
If  Satan  rise  up  against  Satan  he  is  divided  and  hath  an  end,  and  he 
adds  that  in  order  to  spoil  a  strong  man  he  must  first  be  found.  All 
sin  wilj  be  forgiven  save  only  blasphemy  against  the  Holy  Ghost,  but 
such  a  sin  can  never  be,  but  he  who  commits  it  is  in  jeopardy  of  eternal 
damnation.  (This  because  they  accused  him  of  having  an  unclean 
spirit.)  Luke  makes  Jesus  ask  his  accusers  the  counter-question: 
"By  whom  do  your  offspring  cast  out  devils?"  and  say:  "If  I  with 
the  finger  of  God  cast  out  devils,  no  doubt  the  Kingdom  of  God  is 
come  upon  you."  In  Luke  he  had  just  cast  out  a  devil,  and  adds  that 
a  strong  keeper  of  a  palace  can  be  overcome  only  by  one  stronger  yet, 
who  will  then  take  away  his  armour,  and  divide  his  spoil,  closing  the 
incident  in  Matthew  with,  "Who  is  not  with  me  is  against  me,  and  who 
gathereth  not  with  me  scattereth." 


546  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

Here  we  are  in  a  dualistic,  Manichean  world,  conceived  with 
Dantesque  or  Miltonic  vividness.  The  good  and  the  bad,  light  and 
dark,  are  represented  by  highly  developed  hierarchies,  each  with  its 
supreme  leader  and  a  series  of  subordinates  graded  by  ranks.  Most, 
if  not  all,  that  happens  in  both  the  physical  and  the  moral  world  are 
incidents  of  their  incessant  and  relentless  warfare.  One  of  these  inci- 
dents is  that  evil  spirits  often  take  possession  of  the  souls  of  certain 
people.  Many  of  these  Jesus  had  ordered  out,  and  they  had  obeyed 
him  and  fled  away.  Here  the  insidious  and  damning  charge  is  that 
they  obey  his  behest  because  he  is  their  superior  in  command.  He  is 
the  leader  of  their  side,  viz.,  very  Satan  himself,  and  they  do  not  obey 
because  they  are  evicted  by  a  conquering  leader  of  the  hosts  of  good- 
ness. Or,  according  to  many  primitive  concepts,  Jesus  is  here  accused 
of  using  black  and  not  white  magic.  If  this  is  true,  he  is  a  demon  of 
high  degree,  and  not  divine.  He  is  Diabolus  masquerading  as  a  son  of 
God,  and  is  now  detected.  The  issue  is  momentous,  crucial,  perhaps 
sudden,  and  the  alternative  perhaps  the  most  extreme  that  could  be 
conceived  according  to  the  ideas  of  the  cosmos  that  then  prevailed. 
Jesus'  answer  is  that  Satan  would  not  order  the  withdrawal  of  his  own 
forces.  He  wishes  to  possess,  not  to  dispossess,  men.  To  order  him 
out  of  tenements  his  minions  have  conquered  and  occupied,  and  cHng 
to  so  pertinaciously,  would  mean  revolt,  weakness,  and  eventual  ruin. 
Satan  would  never  order  a  retreat;  for  this  would  sow  the  seeds  of  dis- 
sension among  his  own  subordinates,  and  thus  his  house  would  fall. 
The  only  explanation,  therefore,  of  these  cases  of  exorcism,  is  that 
Satan's  emissaries  are  forced  by  a  stronger  hostile  power  to  give  up 
the  ground  they  have  won,  although  it  jeopardizes  the  unity  and  integ- 
rity of  his  kingdom.  Thus  Jesus  constrains  Satan  and  is  more  potent 
than  he,  and  the  power  of  God  comes  very  near  whenever  he  does  these 
acts.  He  asks  his  accusers  by  which  of  these  two  powers  they  cast 
out  devils,  suggesting  that  the  same  charge  they  had  brought  against 
him  might  be  levelled  against  them  with  equal  force.  No  half-way 
ground  is  possible,  therefore.  All  must  be  for  or  against.  It  must  be 
Yahveh  or  Satan,  for  here  are  the  polar  opposites  of  the  moral  world. 
Therefore,  to  reverse  all  tilings,  to  attribute  the  works  of  God  to  the 
devil,  or  vice  versa  to  put  him  in  God's  place,  is  the  greatest,  most  hope- 
less inversion  of  all  values.  It  is  the  one  and  only  unpardonable  sin 
against  the  Holy  Ghost.  It  is,  in  short,  blasphemy.  Frank  diabolism, 
it  may  be  mentioned,  has  had  many  disciples  and  cults  with  sacri- 
legious rites  such  as  the  Witches'  Sabbath  in  which  the  mysteries  of 
Christianity  have  been  parodied  under  the  motto,  "Evil,  be  thou  my 
good."  Satanism  has  had  its  own  decade  and  school  of  Hterature  in 
France  (e.  g.,  Huysmans'  "Des  Esseintes"  and  Baudelaire's  "Les 
Fleurs  du  Mai,"  Stendhal's  work,  and  some  of  the  writings  of  the  very 


THE  PARABLES  OF  JESUS  547 

clever  Paul  Bourget,  who  says,  "We  do  not  want  to  be  saved  and  de- 
prived of  the  voluptuous  pleasure  of  going  to  perdition."  See  also  J. 
H.  Leuba  (Am.  Jour.  Psychol.,  Vol.  5,  pp.  496-539).  Here,  too,  we  might 
cite  the  pathetic  history  of  the  conceptions  of  the  unpardonable  sin 
and  its  effects  on  those  who  are  thought  to  have  committed  it.  But  all 
this  would  take  us  too  far  afield.  The  very  scholarly  but  finicking  and 
jejune  JiiUcher  laboriously  extracts  from  this  parable  the  lesson  that 
"the  expulsion  of  demons  presupposes  the  advent  of  God's  Kingdom." 
To  us  the  lesson  is  eternal  orientation  as  the  condition  of  virtue  in  this 
world  of  moral  duaHsm. 

26.  Agree  with  thine  adversary  promptly  whiles  thou  art  in  the 
way  with  him  (Matt,  v:  25  f.;  Luke  xii:  58-59).  Luke  says,  Give  dili- 
gence to  this  matter  lest  your  enemy  bring  you  to  the  judge  and  he  de- 
liver you  to  the  officers,  and  then  you  will  be  cast  into  prison.  From 
this  there  will  be  no  hope  of  escape  till  you  have  paid  the  uttermost 
mite  or  farthing. 

This  seems  a  precept  of  very  ordinary  but  sound  common  sense, 
which  is  uncommon  enough  in  fact.  Appease  all  enemies  promptly 
for  the  prudential  reason  that  otherwise  you  may  have  to  go  to  law 
and  be  caused  greater  trouble .  Not  only  the  nature  but  the  history 
of  this  parable  makes  it  a  good  illustration  of  what  is  often  called  the 
elasticity  of  the  parables,  and  it  might  be  stretched  into  a  commenda- 
tion of  arbitration  to  prevent  war,  a  utiHtarian  removal  of  all  possible 
causes  for  quarrels  in  their  bud  in  the  interests  of  peaceableness,  as  a 
precept  never  to  make  enemies  when  it  is  possible  to  avoid  doing  so, 
because  vengeance  is  an  infection  that  rankles  and  tends  to  grow 
rapidly  to  dangerous  proportions.  "Agree"  may  mean  any  kind  of 
appeasement,  from  apology  and  pardon-begging  to  placation  by  the 
extremest  self-abasement.  The  implication  is  that  those  addressed 
are  either  weaker  or  less  resentful  or  more  conciliatory  than  their 
adversary,  nor  is  it  entirely  inconsistent  with  Bacon's  injunction  to 
avoid  entrance  into  a  quarrel  but  being  in,  to  comport  oneself  so 
that  the  enemy  will  beware  of  one.  Here  only  one  specific  aspect  of  a 
very  complex  situation  is  singled  out  of  how  the  true  aristocrat  of  the 
Kingdom  will  act.  Jesus'  allusion  to  lawyers  who  tend  to  magnify 
disagreements  is  often  suggested  and  perhaps  also  his  distrust  of  Courts 
and  of  humanly  administered  justice. 

27.  Noting  how  they  chose  the  chief  rooms,  Jesus  said  (Luke  xiv: 
7-14),  When  bidden  to  a  wedding,  do  not  sit  in  the  highest  place  lest  a 


548  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

more  honourable  man  come  and  be  given  your  seat  and  you  have  to  sit 
lower  down.  Rather  choose  the  lowest  place,  and  then  the  host  may 
say  to  you,  "  Go  up  higher."  Then  the  other  guests  will  respect  you 
for  the  honour  they  see  done  you.  For  whoso  exalteth  himself  shall 
be  abased,  and  he  that  humbleth  himself  shall  be  exalted. 

Weddings  greatly  impressed  the  celibate  Jesus,  and  he  evolved 
from  them  many  of  his  highest  and  most  sublimated  insights  and  im- 
partations,  and  the  same  was  true,  perhaps,  in  even  a  higher  degree,  of 
eating  and  feasts.  This  parable  is  a  part  of  the  table-talk  with  a  lead- 
ing Pharisee.  Jesus  announced  it  as  a  parable,  perhaps  in  a  spirit 
of  pleasant  banter.  Possibly  he  himself  occupied  the  lowest  place  at 
table,  and  if  so  this  would  have  made  his  utterance  more  impressive. 
It  has  been  suggested  that  he  had  insisted  on  taking  it,  perhaps  not  so 
much  with  design  in  order  to  give  point  to  an  admonition  which  he 
planned  to  give,  as  to  explain  his  humble  place.  Perhaps,  too,  the  host 
had  given  an  object  lesson  by  changing  the  position  of  some  of  the 
guests,  raising  some  and  degrading  others;  for  in  ancient  symposia, 
as  we  see  in  Plato,  this  was  often  an  important  though  very  delicate 
matter.  If  so,  it  was  all  stingingly  apposite  and  personal,  but  the 
opportunity  sharply  to  point  and  bring  home  a  moral  was  too  good  to 
be  lost,  and  this  applies,  even  though  it  was  Jesus'  seat  that  was  re- 
garded as  the  head  of  the  table. 

This  has  a  close  parallel  in  one  of  the  adages  of  Mencius,  suggesting 
on  its  face  merely  the  conduct  proper  for  a  true  gentleman,  so  that  it 
might  stand  in  any  book  of  good  manners  or  etiquette.  It  would  be 
foolish  to  take  a  seat  on  the  platform  if  there  was  a  chance  of  being 
asked  to  come  down  and  make  room  for  others  there.  There  seems 
no  superhuman  wisdom  here,  but  as  if  by  some  Swedenborgian  corre- 
spondence between  things  earthly  and  things  heavenly,  it  is  made  an 
apperceptive  formula  of  insight  into  the  next  world.  The  merit  that 
takes  the  lowest  place  is  just  that  which  deserves  the  highest.  The 
immanent  and  the  transcendental  are  complemental  each  to  the  other. 
The  Diesseits  and  the  Jenseits  are  not  copies  but  counterparts,  if  not 
antitheses.  Jesus  humbled  himself  in  his  earthly  life,  and  was  later 
exalted.  So  the  beatitudes  are  upon  the  weak,  lowly,  humble,  poor 
in  spirit.  Heaven  pays  well,  and  abnegation  here  brings  blessing 
beyond.  Investment  in  the  momentary  obscurity  of  this  Hfe  buys  an 
eternity  of  glory.  Mundane  relations  are  only  negatives  of  those  found 
in  the  fairyland  beyond.  What  we  have  there  is  measured  by  what  we 
forego  here.  This  may  be  a  parable  of  asceticism  to  which  the  dis- 
guises of  meanness  became  the  chosen  incognitos  of  good  sense.  This 
at  least  underlies  the  parable,  and  is  a  meaning  that  finds  fuller  out- 
crops in  other  teachings  of  Our  Lord. 


THE  PARABLES  OF  JESUS  549 

28.  To  a  Greek  woman  who  asked  Jesus  to  cast  out  a  devil  from 
her  daughter  Jesus  said  (Mark  vii:  27;  Matt,  xv:  26  f.):  "Let  the 
children  first  be  filled  for  it  is  not  meet  to  take  the  children's  bread 
and  to  cast  it  unto  the  dogs,"  She  replied:  "Yes,  Lord,  yet  the  dogs 
under  the  table  eat  of  the  children's  crumbs."  Pleased  at  this,  Jesus 
cast  out  the  devil  from  her  daughter  (a  cure  at  a  distance).  Matthew 
adds  that  at  first  Jesus  answered  her  not  till  the  disciples  wanted  to 
send  her  away,  and  then  said  that  he  was  sent  only  to  the  lost  sheep, 
especially  to  Israel. 

Here  Jesus  is  made  to  seem  persuaded  to  make  an  exception  to 
the  rule  of  helping  Hebrews,  first  by  a  deft,  repartee-like  plea  of  a 
gentile  mother  who  bested  him  by  turning  his  semiparable  on  her  side 
and  against  him.  Matthew  adds  that  he  commended  her  faith  in 
believing  that  not  a  whole  ration  but  only  a  crumb  was  sufficient  for 
the  cure.  Let  us  hope,  too,  that  although  realizing  as  he  must  that 
he  was  outwitted  and  his  own  simile  fairly  turned  against  him,  and  that 
by  a  despised  alien  and  woman,  he  capitulated  gracefully  and  as  a 
gentleman  rather  than,  as  some  urge,  because  he  was  susceptible  to 
the  other  sex,  although  there  are  elsewhere  suggestions  of  this,  as  in 
Renan  and  several  of  the  apocryphal  writings. 

The  interpretation  commonly  stressed  is  that  this  marks  a  step 
toward  universalism  in  the  later  PauHne  sense,  and  that  crumbs  under 
the  table  are  among  the  first  suggestions  of  missionary  work.  It  also 
contributed  something  to  the  miraculous  efficiency  afterward  ascribed 
in  Church  legends  to  the  crumbs  of  the  sacrament,  which  as  the  body 
of  Our  Lord  came  to  be  cared  for  with  such  superstitious  anxiety. 
Some  think  that  it  marks  not  only  an  early  but  the  first  stage  in  Jesus' 
mind  of  a  realization  that  non-Israehtes  were  to  profit  by  his  mission, 
and  that  the  parable  of  outcasts  taking  the  place  of  those  first  invited 
stands  for  a  later  and  more  developed  conception  by  Jesus  of  the  scope 
of  his  work.  In  the  later  parables,  on  this  theory  the  dogs  under 
come  to  be  seated  at  the  table,  and  the  chief  priests  and  the  Jews  of 
high  degree  are  not  present  even  as  dogs  under  it.  Jesus'  race  feeUng 
was  intense,  and  he  was  more  or  less  caste-bound  to  the  end.  The 
"  children"  whom  he  wished  to  sit  at  the  table  were  true  orthodox  Jews; 
but  of  his  ideal  of  reaching  them  he  was  soon  disillusioned,  and  so 
came  to  put  his  trust  in  and  direct  his  effort  toward  the  people  or 
masses,  who  were  chiefly  represented  on  his  board  of  disciples.  In 
the  above  parable  he  perhaps  first  grasped  the  next  step,  viz.,  of  direct- 
ing efforts  to  the  still  wider  circle  of  gentiles  who  later,  in  fact,  came 
to  constitute  practically  all  of  his  followers,  for  Christianity  offers 
the  most  complete  case  of  an  ethnically  transplanted  rehgion.    If  so, 


550  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

then  this  nimble-minded  unknown  Greek  mother  marked  an  epoch 
in  the  psychogenesis  of  Christianity,  and  she  would  have  been  fitter 
than  Thekla  to  be  the  heroine  of  the  spurious  Acts  of  Paul. 

B.   TRUE  PARABLES 

29.  He  who  hears  and  does  Jesus'  precepts  is  like  a  man  who  builds 
a  house  on  a  rock,  even  if  he  has  to  dig  down  to  it  (Matt,  vii:  24-7; 
Luke  vi:  41-9).  Then,  when  wind  and  storm  beat  on  it,  it  stands  firm. 
He  who  hears  and  does  not,  builds  his  house  on  earth  and  sand,  and 
then,  when  flood  and  storm  come,  it  falls  and  is  a  wreck. 

This  duplex  parable  is  in  Luke  the  epilogue  or  peroration  01  the 
sermon  on  the  mount,  and  might  well  end  every  sermon.  Its  appli- 
cation is  plain  as  day.  Gnosis  is  good,  for  it  builds,  but  the  structure 
lacks  durability.  Willed  action  carried  on  to  the  point  of  habituation 
is  the  rock.  This  is  the  solid  basis  of  human  nature  to  which  the  mind 
trusts  that  builds  for  aye.  It  is  character,  not  nativistic,  but  made  as 
a  result  of  precept.  It  is  knowledge  put  into  the  form  of  will  and 
deeds,  which  are  the  language  of  complete  men  and  become  trans- 
missible by  heredity  as  merely  noetic  attainments  are  not.  Wind, 
flood,  and  rain  are  trials;  and  storm,  and  stress,  and  sand  are  good 
impulses  and  resolutions,  not  petrified  into  character.  Jesus  had  a 
penchant  for  symbols  of  steadfastness  and  perdurabiHty.  Simon  was 
surnamed  Peter  the  Rock,  or  cornerstone  of  the  Church.  Heaven  and 
earth  will  fail,  but  no  item  of  his  word.  His  followers  must  be  stead- 
fast and  immovable.  As  a  mason  as  well  as  a  carpenter  Jesus  felt  the 
force  of  such  similitudes.  The  discourse  of  which  this  is  the  end  con- 
sisted of  precepts  to  live  by,  which  were  not  intended  to  be  mere  en- 
lighteners  of  the  intellect.  They  were  a  philosophy  to  be  embodied 
in  life.  To  live  by  and  according  to  these  directions  is  to  build  on 
the  solid  Rock  of  Ages.  The  same  might  be  said  of  industrial,  and 
especially  of  engineering,  activities.  These  must  be  based  on  sound 
scientific  principles  or  come  to  naught,  as  thousands  of  them  in  this 
country  do  for  this  reason.  Also,  so  far  as  we  are  artificers  of  our 
own  fortunes,  sound  moral  principles  are  the  rock  to  build  on,  not 
merely  to  be  known  and  assented  to.  Re-education  cannot  be  se- 
curely accomplished  without  adding  perspiration  to  aspiration.  To 
respond  to  good  inculcations  only  by  the  phosphorescent  glow  of  an- 
swering good  purposes  or  wishes  is  nothing  but  leaves,  not  fruit.  If 
this  parable  was  intended  to  be  restricted  to  the  sermon  on  the  mount, 
it  shows  how  fundamental  Jesus  considered  that  discourse.  Few  com- 
mentators think  the  storm  or  flood  has  any  eschatological  reference, 
although  it  harmonizes  with  the  doctrine  of  the  perseverance  of  the 


THE  PARABLES  OF  JESUS  551 

saints.  The  world  longs  for  certainty  ineluctable,  for  some  aliquod 
inconcussum  which  cannot  be  moved  and  on  which  the  soul  can  stand 
securely.  Kant  compared  truth  to  a  rocky  island  set  amidst  tempes- 
tuous and  foggy  seas  of  doubt.  Men  have  sought  it  in  reUgion,  phi- 
losophy, science.  Here,  says  Jesus,  it  is,  so  far  as  needed  as  the  basis 
for  the  moral  conduct  of  life. 

30.  A  man  goes  to  his  neighbour  at  midnight  and  asks  for  three 
loaves  to  set  before  a  friend  who  has  just  unexpectedly  arrived  from  a 
journey.  The  neighbour  aroused  from  his  slumber  cries  out  from 
within,  Trouble  me  not.  The  door  is  shut  and  I  am  abed  with  my 
children  and  cannot  rise  and  serve  you.  Now  although  he  would  not 
rise  because  asked  by  a  friend,  he  will  arise  and  give  him  all  he  wants  if 
sufl5ciently  importuned.  Therefore  ask,  seek,  knock,  and  you  will 
prevail  (Luke  xi:  5-10). 

This  anecdote  is  a  genre  picture  of  lowly  life.  A  poor  man  has  an 
unexpected,  tired,  and  hungry  guest  at  midnight,  when,  as  Wendt  and 
Weiss  explain,  bread  shops  are  closed.  His  own  larder  is  bare,  so  that 
he  cannot  perform  the  duties  of  hospitality,  so  imperative  that  Tiersch 
explains  these  gave  the  host's  request  a  much  stronger  appeal  than  if 
he  had  asked  for  his  own  needs.  Waking  the  friendly  neighbour  in 
the  weary  traveller's  behalf,  the  former,  inert  with  sleep,  voices  his 
reluctance  to  arise  and  disturb  his  children.  The  disturber  of  sleep, 
however,  is  not  in  the  least  rebuffed,  discouraged,  or  fearful  of  arousing 
the  resentment  of  his  somnolent  friend,  and  so  persists  in  his  request 
till  his  well-disposed  but  torpid  friend  rises  and  gives  him  all  he  asks. 
The  moral  is  perseveration  in  proffering  requests. 

But  is  the  good  Lord  the  sleepy  neighbour  who  must  be  awakened 
as  the  prophet  of  old  exhorted  the  priests  of  Baal  to  cry  louder  and 
again  lest  their  unresponsive  god  be  sleeping  or  travelling?  If  so,  he 
certainly  does  not  here  seem  more  anxious  to  give  than  his  petitioners 
are  to  receive;  nor  is  he  in  the  role  of  one  who  never  slumbers  or  sleeps. 
This  reference  seems  to  fall  in  the  blind  spot  of  Jesus'  purpose  here, 
while  in  the  fovea  is  the  injunction  that  the  Lord  will  not  feel  that  we 
are  imposing  on  him  or  presuming  too  much  upon  his  good  will  if  we 
break  in  upon  his  slumbers  and  arouse  him  and  his  celestial  household 
to  give  us  for  a  needy  guest.  The  host  is,  perhaps,  less  ashamed  of  his 
imprudence  in  being  caught  unprovided  in  the  presence  of  his  neigh- 
bour than  he  is  before  his  guest.  But  hospitable  instincts  are  also 
probably  outside  the  scope  of  the  parable.  The  crucial  point  is  that 
believers  should  not  in  their  prayers  simply  ask  and,  if  they  do  not 
receive,  withdraw  with  dignity  or  discouragement,  nor  should  they  do 


552  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

so  out  of  deference  to  the  Lord's  state  or  convenience,  but  should  keep 
on  urging  their  needs,  and  persevere  in  so  doing  till  they  are  gratified. 
To  pray  and  not  receive  is  always  a  great  and  crucial  trial  to  faith, 
especially  that  of  young  converts,  and  it  is  against  the  discouragement 
and  possible  unbeUef  of  those  whose  requests  are  deferred  or  unan- 
swered that  Jesus  here  provides  a  safeguard  for  those  who  follow  him, 
even  though  to  do  so  he  represents  the  All-Father  in  an  all  too  human 
role.  Elsewhere  importunity  is  represented  as  overcoming  indiffer- 
ence or  disinclination  on  the  Lord's  part,  but  here  he  is  first  asleep, 
and  then  shows  the  inertness  that  follows  sudden  waking.  Here  in- 
clination is  not  absent,  but  only  torpid.  Jesus  seems  inconsiderate 
of  the  way  in  which  the  Lord  appears.  He  permits  him  to  do  so  in  a 
very  undivine  light,  excessively  anthropomorphized,  because  in  so 
doing  he  can  make  pertinacity  in  intercession  seem  more  necessary, 
and  more  hopeful.  Better  the  heavenly  Father  be  thought  somnolent 
and  lazy  than  have  believers  lose  confidence  in  the  answer  to  their 
prayer.  Consider  the  Lord  as  human,  only  too  human,  but  do  not 
doubt  that  he  is  at  heart  well  disposed  to  answer  prayer.  Thus  Jesus, 
true  pragmatist  that  he  is,  meets  the  great  danger  that  men  may  fall 
away  and  grow  faint-hearted  by  an  astonishing  sacrifice  of  the  dignity 
and  subhmity  of  the  Lord.  The  interests  of  men  are  after  all  his  great 
concern.  Thus  we  have  a  profound  and  most  illuminating  glance  into 
Jesus'  true  mind  and  will.  His  relation  is  primarily  with  man,  and 
not,  as  older  theology  made  out,  with  God. 

31.  In  a  parable  which  Luke  says  is  to  teach  men  always  to  pray 
without  ceasing  (xviii:  1-8),  Jesus  tells,  as  if  it  were  a  true  incident, 
of  a  judge  who  feared  neither  God  nor  man,  to  whom  a  widow  prayed 
to  be  avenged  of  her  adversary.  At  first  he  turned  a  deaf  ear,  but 
later  decided  to  avenge  her  lest  by  her  continued  importunity  she 
weary  him.  If  an  unjust  judge  was  thus  spurred  to  do  his  duty,  how 
much  more  will  God  avenge  his  own  elect  who  cry  to  him  day  and 
night?  Though  he  bear  long,  he  will  avenge  them  speedily.  Shall  the 
Son  find  faith  on  earth  when  he  comes?  The  widow  was  deserted, 
in  sorrow  and  need,  and  exposed  to  we  know  not  what  trials,  persecu- 
tions, or  temptations,  from  which  a  just  judge  would  desire  to  free  her. 
This  judge  had  no  love  of  justice  and  no  sympathy  with  the  victim  of 
injustice,  but  granted  her  request  at  last,  solely  to  be  rid  of  her. 

In  the  previous  parable  (30)  of  the  sleeping  householder  aroused 
from  slumber  to  give  bread  to  a  neighbour  for  a  guest,  previous  ac- 
quaintance and  good  will  are  assumed,  but  here  these  are  apparently 


THE  PARABLES  OF  JESUS  553 

absent  so  that  this  parable  intensifies  still  more  the  efficiency  of  im- 
portunity. A  strong  and  reiterated  wish  tends  to  realize  itself  if  the 
object  to  which  it  is  addressed  is  in  fact  not  an  objective  deity  but  our 
own  deeper,  larger,  and  more  potent  unconscious  nature.  This  in- 
junction thus  seems  good  modern  psychology.  We  have  constantly  to 
spur  and  incite  our  submerged  self  to  wake  it  (as  in  30),  or  as  here  to 
worry  it  into  activity;  for  the  conscious  mind  needs  its  help.  We  ob- 
jectify our  racial  and  unconscious  nature  from  an  inveterate  habit  of 
projective  or  ejective  thought  imposed  upon  us  by  sense  experience. 
Hartmann's  philosophy  calls  the  unconscious  not  only  omniscient  and 
omnipotent  but  beneficent;  and  in  these  Freudian  days  we  realize 
what  a  power  it  is  in  making  us  well  or  ill,  strong  or  weak,  happy  or 
miserable.  If  it  were  permissible  to  interpret  these  two  parables  in 
this  sense  they  would  teach  rather  the  relative  impotence  of  conscious- 
ness which  is  a  product  of  individual  experience  as  compared  with  the 
vaster  racial  soul  in  each  of  us,  and  suggest  that  when  invoking  a 
mighty  alien  power  to  vouchsafe  to  us  what  we  want,  it  is  best  done  by 
fixation  upon  the  object  of  our  desire.  The  question,  however,  is  best 
discussed  in  the  general  psychology  of  prayer. 

Jesus  in  his  healing  works  seems  almost  powerless  to  resist  per- 
sistency. If  our  efiforts  to  obtain  the  things  we  need  are  feeble,  they 
ought  to  be  unintermittent;  for  as  trickling  water  wears  away  a  rock, 
so  unremitting  effort  will  overcome  every  obstacle.  When  the  sum 
of  many  little  efforts  reaches  a  constant  total,  the  lever  tips,  and  anon 
the  powers  that  rule  the  depths  of  nature  and  the  soul  are  found  on  our 
side,  and  they  assuredly  make  for  righteousness  in  the  end  and  at 
bottom.  The  deepest  and  oldest  things  in  us  are  the  best  organized,  san- 
est and  most  normal,  and  so  an  appeal  to  them  is  often  most  efficacious. 

32.  A  certain  creditor  (Luke  only  viii:  36-50)  had  two  debtors,  one 
who  owed  him  five  hundred  and  another  who  owed  him  fifty  pence; 
and  as  neither  could  pay,  he  forgave  the  debt  to  both  of  them.  Which, 
asked  Jesus,  would  love  that  creditor  most?  They  answered,  He  to 
whom  most  was  forgiven;  and  this  answer  Jesus  approved. 

This  parable  is  inseparable  from  its  setting.  Jesus  was  dining 
with  a  Pharisee  when  a  sinful  woman  entered,  who  wept,  washed  his 
feet  and  wiped  them  with  her  hair,  and  anointed  him  from  an  alabaster 
box.  The  host  thought  that  had  he  been  a  great  prophet,  he  would 
have  known  that  this  woman  was  a  great  sinner,  and  therefore  resented 
her  attention.  Jesus  answering  his  thought  responded  that  he  had 
something  to  say,  and  when  told  to  speak,  gave  this  parable.  Then 
pointing  to  the  woman  he  said  to  the  host,  You  gave  me  no  water  with 


554  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

which  to  wash  my  feet,  but  she  washed  them  with  her  tears  and  dried 
them  with  her  hair.  You  gave  me  no  kiss  but  she  has  continued  to  kiss 
my  feet.  You  did  not  anoint  my  head,  but  she  anointed  my  feet. 
Therefore  her  sins  which  are  many,  are  forgiven,  for  she  loved  much. 
Those  to  whom  Uttle  is  forgiven  love  little.  To  the  woman  he  said, 
Thy  sins  are  forgiven.  Thy  faith  hath  saved  thee.  Go  in  peace; 
while  the  guests  murmured.  Who  is  this  who  forgives  sins? 

Altogether,  this  prose  idyll  in  which  the  parable  is  set  as  an  apt 
and  illustrative  anecdote  has  always  been  one  of  the  most  cherished 
incidents  of  Jesus'  life,  on  which  the  Christian  consciousness  dwells  with 
great  fondness.  Grace  is  most  abounding  to  the  greatest  sinners. 
Those  plucked  as  brands  from  the  burning  naturally  love  most.  The 
pathos  of  forgiveness  and  gratitude  is  the  dominant  motive,  and  art 
has  loved  to  give  the  whole  a  scenic  setting.  Nothing  could  be  more 
lucid  and  unambiguous  than  the  lesson  it  teaches.  A  fallen  woman  is 
not  beyond  the  reach  of  salvation.  To  the  Lord  her  sin  is  like  a  debt 
forgiven;  and  no  wonder  that  the  easy,  spontaneous  assumption  of  the 
power  to  forgive  sin  as  a  creditor  might  forgive  a  debt  gives  his  fellow 
diners  pause.  Some  think  the  woman  is  Mary  Magdalene  who  there- 
after followed  Jesus  with  such  touching  fidelity  and  devotion.  Her 
act  is  voluntary,  abject,  and  self-humiUating,  and  an  act  not  only  of 
pathetic  but  of  costly  devotion. 

This  story  contributes  to  one  trait  of  vulgar  converts,  viz.,  osten- 
tatiously magnifying  the  depth  of  the  iniquity  of  their  previous  lives 
in  order  to  impress  others  with  a  sense  that  they  had  had  forgiveness  to 
an  exceptional  degree,  as  if  they  had  been  objects  of  pecuhar,  divine 
favouritism,  and  therefore  could  love  with  greater  fervour;  so  that  it 
has  often  been  asked  whether  it  is  not  better  to  have  sinned  much,  if 
only  one  is  surely  forgiven,  than  to  have  sinned  little  or  not  at  all. 
This  is  a  peculiar  trait  of  the  revival  psychosis.  But  a  debt,  even  if 
forgiven,  is  still  in  a  sense  due,  and  no  power  can  truly  forgive  it. 
Pardon,  too,  is  always  relative  and  personal.  An  avenger  may  refuse 
to  retaliate,  but  this  is  not  all  of  forgiveness.  Would  a  man  of  Stoic 
pride  or  of  true  honour  consent  to  be  rehabilitated  or  relieved  from 
paying  a  price  by  an  act  of  insolvency  or  taking  a  poor  debtor's  oath,  or 
even  having  another  pay  a  debt  that  he  had  incurred?  The  Nietzsche 
superman  says.  If  I  have  deserved  hell  by  my  own  life,  it  is  hell 
that  I  want,  for  I  could  never  be  happy  in  heaven  if  I  did  not  merit  it 
in  my  own  person.  To  think  I  can  sin  and  evade  its  consequence  by 
hiding  behind  the  skirts  of  Jesus  is  not  an  invitation  to  sin,  but  to 
accept  it  is  to  abandon  manliness,  and  only  a  craven  soul  can  accept  a 
salvation  that  is  not  his  due.  By  this  doctrine  a  man  is  sold  not  so 
nmch  to  sin  as  to  priestcraft,  and  the  sale  of  indulgences  is  inevitable. 
The  only  true  redemption  is  to  pay  the  penalty  in  full,  and  that  also  is 


THE  PARABLES  OF  JESUS  555 

in  fact  what  every  sinner  always  did  and  must  always  do.  In  nature 
or  psychology  there  is  no  such  thing  as  a  vicarious  atonement.  The 
soul  that  sins  dies,  and  it  was  Paul,  not  Jesus,  who  taught  anything 
at  variance  with  this.  Let  us  rather  follow  those  who  hold  that  in 
forgiving  the  sinful  woman  Jesus  only  meant  that  he  would  not  con- 
demn her,  but  saw  saving  goodness  in  her  penitence.  He  sympathized 
with,  trusted,  and  pardoned  her,  but  had  no  thought  of  unlocking  the 
door  of  heaven  to  her.  Again,  if  Jesus  is  loved  ten  times  as  much  by 
those  he  has  forgiven  ten  times  as  much,  then  one  great  sinner's  love  is 
equal  to  that  of  ten  who  are  forgiven  little;  while  those  who  need  no 
forgiveness,  if  such  exist,  would  experience  no  love.  But  here  comes  in 
the  law  of  compensation.  If  after  leading  a  sinful  life  we  are  converted, 
we  instinctively  strive  to  atone  for  the  past  by  doing  supererogatory 
good  enough  to  compensate  for  the  badness  of  our  previous  Ufe.  What 
is  this  deep  instinct  but  an  impulse  to  work  out  our  own  salvation, 
to  which  we  are  impelled  even  though  we  have  confessed  and  received 
absolution?  In  the  Catholic  confessional  an  ever  larger  part  of  the 
help  which  the  penitent  receives  comes  from  the  human  sympathy 
and  encouragement  extended  by  the  priest,  and  less  can  be  ascribed  to 
the  sense  that  post-mortem  penalties  are  removed,  indefinitely  helpful 
though  this  sense  is  to  those  who  can  still  whole-heartedly  believe  it. 
Sin  is  unsocial,  and  its  very  act  tends  to  isolation,  which  for  gregarious 
man  is  always  painful.  Thus,  to  have  a  true  friend  take  us  by  the 
hand,  express  confidence  and  good  will,  and  act  toward  us  as  if  we  had 
never  gone  astray — this  is  the  only  forgiveness,  and  this  alone  may  res- 
cue.   But  of  this  elsewhere. 

33.  A  king  (Matt.  xviii:2i-35)  took  account  of  his  servants.  One 
owed  him  ten  thousand  talents,  and  as  he  had  nothing  to  pay,  it  was 
ordered  that  he  and  his  wife  and  children  be  sold  to  make  good  the  debt. 
But  the  servant  fell  down,  implored  pardon,  and  promised  to  pay  all, 
and  thus  he  aroused  the  king's  compassion  so  that  he  was  forgiven  all. 
This  same  servant  went  out  and  found  a  fellow  servant  who  owed  him 
one  hundred  pence,  and  seized  him  by  the  throat  and  demanded  pay- 
ment. His  victun  fell  down,  implored  patience,  and  promised  to  pay 
all;  but  he  was  not  heard,  but  cast  into  prison  till  all  was  paid.  The 
king  hearing  of  this  sunmioned  the  servant,  rebuked  him,  and  asked 
why  he  had  not  exercised  to  his  debtor  the  same  pity  that  had  been 
shown  to  him,  and  in  anger  gave  him  over  to  be  tormented  till  the  ten 
thousand  talents  were  made  good.  Thus  will  the  Lord  do  to  you  if  you 
do  not  all  from  your  very  hearts  forgive  every  one  who  trespasses 
against  you.    Forgive  as  you  have  been  forgiven  is  the  obvious  moral. 


Ss6  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

We  are  again,  as  in  the  preceding  parable,  in  the  reahn  of  debt  and 
credit.  Creditors  in  that  day  had  almost  unlimited  power  over  their 
debtors  and  often  used  it  flagrantly,  requiring  their  full  pound  of  flesh. 
Creditors  were  often  also  extortionate  and  usurers;  hence  this  parable 
must  have  gone  home.  In  a  sense  there  is  nothing  specifically  Chris- 
tian here,  and  various  parallels  are  found  in  the  teachings  of  the  Old 
Testament.  In  the  context  Peter  had  just  asked  how  often  if  a  brother 
sinned,  he  should  be  forgiven,  and  had  been  told  seventy  times  seven, 
and  then  follows  this  parable.  It  is  doubtful,  however,  if  we  have  the 
true  context  here.  At  least  the  cruel  servant  is  only  forgiven  once  and 
then  condemned  beyond  redemption,  as  if  Jesus  would  place  those 
guilty  of  such  iniquity  as  this  in  as  low  a  circle  of  the  inferno  as  Dante 
did.  The  heinousness  of  the  offence  of  the  pitiless  servant  appears  here 
set  off  by  the  damning  fact  that  he  had  just  been  forgiven  a  vastly 
greater  debt,  so  that  his  inhumanity  to  his  own  debtor  mmediately 
afterward  is  so  incredible  that  it  has  been  variously  explained.  The 
reason  we  must  forgive  debts  to  the  poor  is  not  because  they  deserve 
it,  or  because  it  is  good  for  us  to  do  so,  but  because  the  dear  Lord  has 
forgiven  us  all  a  far  greater  debt.  The  servant  was  not  forcibly  col- 
lecting debts  owed  to  him  in  order  to  pay  what  he  owed  the  king,  be- 
cause this  obligation  had  been  cancelled.  As  he  who  gives  to  the  poor 
lends  to  the  Lord,  so  to  forgive  a  debt  to  one  unable  to  pay  it  is  to  pay 
our  own  debt  to  the  Lord,  and  the  natural  impulse  to  remit  a  debt  to 
others  after  a  larger  obligation  which  we  have  been  ourselves  under 
has  been  remitted  shows  the  conduct  of  the  servant  in  a  very  dark 
light  by  contrast.  Modern  society  recognizes  the  principle  here 
taught  in  its  statutes  of  limitation  of  debts,  and  also  in  its  bankruptcy 
laws. 

Behind  the  debt  and  credit  terms  of  the  parable,  however,  lies  a 
larger  lesson  of  forgiving  all  kinds  of  trespasses  as  we  have  been  forgiven 
them.  Some  commentators  waste  much  ingenuity  in  discussing  the 
significance  of  this  largest  sum  of  money,  ten  thousand  talents,  men- 
tioned by  Jesus,  and  think  he  uses  it  perhaps  as  a  child  uses  millions 
as  the  highest  number  it  knows,  and  thus  it  stands  in  Jesus'  mind  for 
the  immeasurable  debt  all  sinners  owe.  Others  discuss  the  "tormen- 
tors," usually  opining  that  they  refer  to  the  powers  of  hell.  Others 
discuss  the  cause  of  the  change  of  mood  of  the  servant,  who  must  have 
at  first  been  greatly  exalted  and  happy  when  he  was  forgiven,  so  that 
some  special  experience  must  be  assumed  to  account  for  his  apparently 
sudden  change  to  cruelty.  Some  postulate  that  the  remission  he  had 
experienced  was  given  publicly,  and  that  he  was  taunted  by  his  co- 
servants  with  accepting  a  gratuity,  or  that  he  excited  their  envy  by 
being  an  object  of  favouritism,  and  that  this  angered  him.  Still 
others  think  that  after  having  laboured  so  long  under  a  debt  that 


THE  PARABLES  OF  JESUS  557 

seemed  to  him  hopeless,  he  was  suddenly  rid  of  it,  and  developed  a 
new  or  revived  an  old  but  abandoned  ambition,  perhaps  a  strong  child- 
ish wish,  to  become  rich  himself,  which  now  became  possible;  and  so  he 
took  this  cruel  way  to  attain  his  end.  Still  others  think  his  black 
moral  perversity  only  a  fit  image  of  man's  treatment  of  the  Lord,  and 
imply  that  if  he  was  morally  insane  so  are  all  unregenerate  men.  It 
shows  also  the  two  personalities  of  the  Lord,  the  loving  and  forgiving 
on  the  one  hand,  and  the  punitive  and  vengeful  on  the  other,  and  how 
readily  the  one  attitude  passes  over  into  the  other. 

Over  against  all  such  subtleties  we  must  not  forget  that  this, 
like  most  of  the  other  parables,  is  a  humble  effort  to  teach  homely, 
practical  truths  to  the  populace,  and  thus  most  scholastic  efforts  to 
explain  it  are  nothing  but  sophistic  pedantry  that  detracts  rather 
than  adds  to  its  force.  Mercy  and  compassion,  tenderness  and  pity, 
could  stand  out  in  no  stronger  contrast  than  over  against  poverty  and 
debt,  so  common  and  so  pathetic  in  this  age  of  Roman  exaction,  which 
had  reduced  to  direst  need  so  large  a  part  of  the  population  even  in  this 
very  fertile  land.  All  are  debtors,  and  if  under  the  law  of  justice  God 
should  foreclose,  the  best  of  us  would  be  bankrupt  and  sold  for  debt; 
but  he  remits  freely  as  he  would  have  us  do.  Hegel's  "Phenomenology" 
makes  forgiveness  the  very  essence  of  religion,  marking  its  emergence 
from  within  as  the  soul's  act  of  sovereign  majesty,  making  the  done  as 
though  it  were  undone.  To  repent  is  to  alienate  and  estrange  our- 
selves from  our  past — to  cast  it  off  as  a  nullity.  Such  is  the  vigour  of 
our  nature  and  the  power  of  God  that  man  can  eject  his  baser  self, 
as  the  cell  extrudes  the  polar  globules  that  it  does  not  need.  Thus  we 
moult  sin,  even  when  it  is  well  entrenched.  Forgiveness,  therefore,  is 
a  good  measure  of  the  stages  of  moral  and  religious  life.  Freedom  to 
become  bad  involves  the  power  to  become  good  again.  Penalty  for 
ejected  sin  retards  the  magnificent  stages  of  its  expulsion  from  the  soul, 
while  pardon,  if  hearty  and  reiterated,  accelerates  them.  ^  Perhaps  con- 
fession as  now  understood  by  alienists  has  this  strange  therapeutic  power. 
If  the  debt  cajicelled  is  great,  the  joy  of  its  remission  is  also  great. 

34.  Despise  not  these  little  ones  (Matt.  xviii:io-i4)  for  their 
angels  (or  souls)  always  behold  the  Father's  face.  The  Son  came  to 
save  the  lost.  If  a  man  have  one  hundred  sheep  and  one  go  astray, 
he  leaves  the  ninety  and  nine,  seeking  the  lost  one,  and  if  he  find  it, 
he  rejoices  more  in  that  one  than  in  the  ninety  and  nine  that  went  not 
astray.  The  Lord  does  not  wish  one  of  these  little  ones  to  perish. 
Luke  (xv:i-io)  gives  this  parable  a  different  setting.  To  pubHcans 
and  sinners  who  drew  near,  and  to  the  scribes  and  Pharisees  who 

^Sce  my  tniulatioB  of  Rosenkians't  "Begel  as  the  National  Philosopher  of  Germany,"  p.  146. 


558  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

murmured  that  Jesus  received  and  ate  with  simiers,  he  gives  this  parable 
of  the  lost  sheep.  Here  the  shepherd  returns  with  the  sheep  on  his 
shoulder  and  calls  his  neighbours  to  rejoice  with  him  because  the  lost 
is  found.  Matthew  adds  that  there  is  more  joy  in  heaven  over  one 
sinner  that  repents  than  over  ninety  and  nine  just  men  who  need  no 
repentance.  Luke  also  adds  the  story  of  the  woman  losing  one  of  her 
ten  silver  coins.  She  then  lights  a  candle,  sweeps  and  seeks  till  it  is 
found,  and  then  calls  her  friends  to  rejoice  with  her.  So  the  angels 
rejoice  most  over  sinners  who  repent.  How  much  more  is  a  man  worth 
than  a  sheep  or  a  piece  of  silver?  The  parent  or  teacher  having  a  sick 
or  even  imbecile  child  cares  more  for  it  than  for  all  the  others  who  are 
normal,  for  need  and  helplessness  increase  love. 

If  this  doctrine  applies  to  degenerate  man,  it  is  anti-eugenic,  for 
care  is  most  worthily  and  most  profitably  for  mankind  bestowed  on 
those  who  are  best.  But  pity  drew  the  Christian  God  from  heaven  to 
earth,  and  human  as  pity  is,  it  tends  to  make  the  Church  a  hospital  or 
asylum.  Matthew's  prelude  concerning  the  little  ones  always  behold- 
ing the  Father's  face  suggests  that  the  errant  was  loved  more  because, 
by  repenting,  he  became  again  as  a  new-born  child.  To  be  lost  cannot 
mean  that  the  Divine  One  does  not  know  where  we  are,  but  that  we 
have  escaped  saving  influences.  Here  the  spirit  that  has  made  mission- 
aries and  slum  workers  is  inculcated.  The  sinner  is  still  God's  prop- 
erty, and  is  loved  as  an  individual.  Reproached  by  his  critics  as  he 
so  often  was  for  it,  Jesus  really  loved  sinners  and  publicans,  whom  the 
Pharisees  held  aloof  from.  Luke,  the  sympathetic  physician,  as  we 
might  expect  gives  this  parable  a  somewhat  higher  colour.  Cyril  called 
the  owner  of  the  flock  the  Saviour.  The  lost  sheep  is  Adam  with  all  his 
posterity;  the  ninety  and  nine  that  stayed  in  the  fold  are  the  hosts  of 
unf alien  angels,  vastly  outnumbering  man;  the  incarnation  is  the  start 
in  quest  of  the  lost;  the  lost  penny  had  God's  unage  on  it,  although  it 
was  obscured  by  rust  and  dirt. 

Would  it  not,  in  fact,  be  better  shepherd-craft  if  one  sheep  were 
lost  out  of  a  flock  of  a  hundred,  for  the  shepherd  to  spend  the  time  and 
energy  here  given  to  finding  the  strayed  one  to  caring  the  better  for  the 
ninety  and  nine  that  remained,  instead  of  leaving  them  uncared  for 
while  seeking  the  lost  one,  that  might  be  found  to  have  impaired  value 
or  to  be  dead  in  the  wilderness?  Yes,  but  for  the  infinite  worth  of  each 
soul  which  is  here  implied.  Could  not  the  woman  earn  several  pence 
with  the  same  effort  spent  in  finding  the  lost  one?  Yes;  but  there 
would  have  been  one  less  coin  in  the  reahn  to  circulate.  These  and  the 
next  are  parables  of  pity,  and  not  of  prudence. 


THE  PARABLES  OF  JESUS  559 

35.  The  younger  of  two  sons  (Luke  xv  111-32)  asked  his  father  to 
give  him  his  part  of  the  inheritance.  He  received  it,  journeyed  afar, 
spent  it  all  in  rioting,  and  when  a  famine  fell,  had  to  herd  swine  and 
became  so  hungry  that  he  longed  for  their  food.  And  he  reflected  that 
even  his  father's  servants  had  bread  while  he  starved,  and  resolved 
within  himself  that  he  would  go  home  to  his  father,  to  whom  and  to 
heaven  he  would  confess  his  sin  and  plead  that  he  was  not  worthy  to 
be  called  his  son,  and  beg  for  a  servant's  place.  As  he  approached 
home,  his  father  saw  him  afar,  pitied,  ran  to  meet,  and  kissed  him, 
whereupon  he  confessed  his  sins  and  his  unfitness  to  be  called  a  son. 
But  the  father  ordered  the  best  robe,  a  ring,  and  shoes  to  be  brought 
for  him;  killed  a  fatted  calf,  and  held  a  feast  because,  as  he  said,  "This 
my  son  was  dead  and  is  alive  again;  he  was  lost  and  is  found."  But  as 
the  elder  son,  who  had  been  working  in  the  field,  drew  near  and  heard 
of  the  festivities  and  was  told  what  it  all  meant,  he  was  wroth;  and 
when  the  father  invited  him  to  enter  and  take  part  he  would  not,  but 
said,  I  have  served  and  obeyed  you  these  many  years,  and  you  made  no 
festival  for  me  as  you  have  done  for  your  younger  son  who  devoured 
his  living  with  harlots.  To  him  his  father  answered,  Son,  thou  art 
always  with  me,  and  all  that  I  have  is  thine,  but  it  is  fit  that  we 
should  make  merry;  for  thy  brother  who  was  dead  is  alive,  was  lost,  is 
found. 


This  is  the  most  comprehensive  of  all  the  parables,  and  was  once 
called  evangelium  in  evangelio;  while  Luther  with  his  Pauline  doctrine 
of  justification  by  faith  neglected,  and  many,  indeed,  have  objected  to, 
it  as  almost  rewarding  dissipation  and  vice.  To  most  Christian 
teachers  this  has  been  one  of  the  very  dearest  of  all  the  parables.  It 
has  also  been  deemed  theocratic.  The  older  son  has  been  called  the 
Jews,  the  younger,  the  heathen.  At  one  time  the  older  represented 
angels,  and  the  younger,  men.  There  are  two  sides,  if  not  indeed  a 
real  dualism,  in  all  rehgions.  This  grievous  sinner  was  freely  forgiven 
without  and  before  any  atonement  had  been  provided  by  Jesus'  death. 
For  this  reason  the  parable  is  a  stumbling  block  to  those  who  make 
justification  rest  solely  upon  faith  in  Jesus'  death  and  Resurrection. 
The  prodigal  in  a  sense  saves  himself.  His  spontaneous  and  internal 
regeneration  is  purely  subjective,  and  is  accepted  by  the  father. 
Beyschlag  says  that  his  salvation,  however,  was  unevangelical  and 
unapostolic.  In  another  sense  we  may  say  that  not  the  Holy  Spurit,  but 
hunger  and  poverty,  converted  this  lost  son.    We  seem  to  have  here  a 


56o  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

contradiction  of  the  motto,  extra  ecclesiam  nulla  salus.  There  was 
perhaps  some  Oedipus-like,  if  unconscious,  father-hatred  which  prompted 
the  son's  departure  with  his  patrimony,  and  his  home-coming  may  have 
been  a  compensating  revulsion  of  feeling.  But  it  all  seems  on  his  part  a 
matter  of  calculation.  He  was  "down  and  out,"  and  preferred  even  a 
servant's  place  at  home  to  the  dire  extremity  in  which  he  found  him- 
self. The  father's  forgiveness  before  any  confession  or  expression  of 
regret  and  his  extreme  joy  at  regaining  his  rakish  son  have  seemed  to 
some  to  smack  of  senility  and  infatuation.  The  older  son's  wrath, 
too,  was  perhaps  not  due  to  a  natural  sense  of  justice  alone,  for  with 
this  feeling  we  can  all  sympathize.  Another  mainspring  of  his  con- 
duct may  have  been  a  desire,  perhaps  unconscious,  to  be  himself  the 
object  of  such  manifestations  of  love  from  his  father  as  were  lavished 
upon  the  renegade  younger  brother.  Only  infatuated  wives  welcome 
back  their  erring  husbands  so  precipitately  and  unquestioningly. 
Does  this  parable  in  some  sense  place  a  premium  upon  sin,  and  dis- 
courage steadfast  devotion  to  duty?  Thus  in  this  parable  we  have, 
as  many  have  thought,  the  same  dangerous  lesson  as  in  the  preceding 
one  of  the  lost  sheep  and  the  penny.  On  this  doctrine  a  fallen  angel, 
weary  of  hell  and  returning,  would  cause  more  rapture  in  heaven  than 
a  large  company  of  unfallen  saints.  This  parable  has  long  been  one 
of  the  favourite  themes  of  art,  of  hymnology,  and  revivaUsm,  and  has 
been  made  the  theme  of  romances  and  dramas  galore  because  man  pities 
his  own  estate.  Of  all  the  Evangelists  Luke  records  most  of  these 
teachings,  and  tradition  has  said  that  he  illustrated  them  in  his  Ufe  as  a 
physician.  It  has  often  been  hinted,  but  without  good  ground,  that 
perhaps  he  had  experienced  salvation  from  great  sin  hunself.  He 
alone,  too,  records  the  parable  of  the  good  Samaritan  to  illustrate  the 
love  of  neighbour  as  of  self.  The  priest  and  the  Levite  passed  by  the 
stripped,  robbed,  and  wounded  man,  but  the  Samaritan  bound  his 
wounds,  after  washing  them  with  oil  and  wine,  took  him  to  an  inn,  and 
on  leaving  left  money  for  his  further  care  and  promised  to  return.  In 
all  these  cases  there  is  special  love  of  the  disinherited,  the  sinful,  the 
victims  of  wrong,  those  who  have  suffered  social  wreckage  from  their 
own  or  others'  passion.  To  the  chief  of  sinners  grace  most  abounds. 
The  graver  the  disease,  the  greater  the  cure,  and  the  more  affection 
would  both  physician  and  patient  bear  each  other.  Nothing  better 
shows  the  power  of  Christianity  than  its  rescue  of  desperate  cases, 
and  perhaps  nothing  so  enhsts  Christian  enthusiasm  as  this  work. 
Christianity,  above  all  other  religions,  is  thus  one  of  hope  in  the  very 
teeth  of  despair.  This  is  the  true  resurrection  from  death,  and  of  this 
every  other  resurrection  is  only  a  symbol,  or  a  parable  crassified,  it 
may  be,  into  hteral  reahty  by  the  very  weight  of  meaning  it  has  to  bear. 
The  grave  and  hell  yield  up  their  prey  to  Jesus;  but  just  as  it  is  easier 


THE  PARABLES  OF  JESUS  561 

and  more  truly  divine  to  forgive  sin  than,  to  heal  the  body,  so  to  revive 
those  dead  in  trespasses  and  sin  is  a  mightier  miracle  than  to  reanimate 
a  corpse. 

How  does  this  constellation  of  instances  comport  with  the  lesson  of 
the  parable  of  the  sower?  The  down-trodden,  the  despised,  whom 
Jesus  would  make  special  efforts  to  find  and  whom  it  gives  pecuHar 
rapture  to  save — are  not  those  most  apt  to  receive  his  teaching?  If 
they  were  so,  then,  at  least,  it  would  seem  that  some  of  the  disciples 
would  have  come  from  this  class,  and  there  is  little  indication  that  this 
was  in  fact  the  case  with  any  one  of  them  or  of  any  other  of  his  near  and 
constant  followers.  None  of  them  had  been  prodigals,  lost  sheep,  or 
objects  of  any  special  work  of  rescue.  It  was  not  any  of  the  special 
quaUties  engendered  by  such  experience,  such  as  Paul  or  Augustine  had, 
that  Jesus  primarily  sought  for  in  his  chosen  apostolate.  Quick  as 
such  cases  are  to  learn,  and  eager  as  they  may  be  to  atone  by  zealous 
propaganda  for  their  own  past,  they  are  not  the  best  human  material 
for  laying  the  foundations  of  the  Kingdom,  serviceable  though  they 
may  be  in  the  later  work  of  building  or  decorating,  and  Jesus  knew  or 
felt  a  very  real  difference  between  relatively  unfallen  and  specially 
restored  human  nature.  Reformed  drunkards  may  conduct  whirlwind 
campaigns  for  teetotalism;  but  they  are  not  likely  to  be  wise  leaders  of 
their  great  cause,  and  still  less  so  to  expound  the  philosophic  doctrines 
of  true  temperance. 

Perhaps  a  fitter  title  for  this  parable  would  be  "A  father's  love.'* 
Some  think  this,  and  more  think  the  parable  of  the  unjust  judge,  may 
have  referred  to  some  real  and  notorious  contemporary  incident.  But 
we  are  not  told  of  the  future  of  the  prodigal,  whether  he  became  re- 
spected and  powerful  or  soon  died  from  the  natural  results  of  his  de- 
bauchery, despite  the  parental  forgiveness.  On  the  other  hand,  we 
must  not  conceive  the  father  as  fatuously  and  senilely  bhnded  by  love 
to  his  son's  sins.  If  we  are  here  taught  that  the  vilest  sinner  may 
return,  and  that  the  Father  will  not  disown  or  disinherit,  but  welcome 
and  lavish  openly  affection  upon  the  penitent,  we  have  surely  a  doc- 
trine that  may  easily  be  abused.    Nature's  penalties  are  inevitable. 

36.  A  man  (Matt,  xxi  128-32)  had  two  sons,  and  he  said  to  the  first, 
"Son,  go  work  to-day  in  my  vineyard";  and  the  son  replied,  "I  will 
not,"  but  afterward  repented  and  went.  The  second  son  given  the 
same  command,  said  "I  go,  sir,"  but  went  not.  Which  of  these  two 
sons,  asks  Jesus,  did  the  father's  will?  His  auditors  repHed  with  ap- 
parent unanimity.  The  first.  And  Jesus  said,  publicans  and  harlots 
will  go  into  the  Kingdom  before  you  (for  they  are  Hke  the  first  son). 
They  believed  John  and  you  did  not.    Luke  (vii  129-30)  adds  that  the 


'562  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

people  and  publicans  heard  John,  but  the  Pharisees  and  lawyers  re- 
jected him. 

Expositors  have  always  treated  this  parable  with  the  greatest 
reserve,  because  they  have  found  it  very  embarrassing.  There  was, 
of  course,  but  one  answer  to  Jesus'  question  concerning  childish  obedi- 
ence. The  lesson  is  clear.  Actions  speak  louder  than  words.  To 
obey  is  of  more  consequence  than  to  promise,  resolve,  or  contract  to  do 
so.  Those  who  make  a  pledge  and  then  fail  to  keep  it  are  worse  than 
those  who  orally  refuse  to  obey  and  then,  on  second  thought,  do  so. 
True  service  is  in  deeds,  and  not  by  word  of  mouth.  There  is  less  harm 
in  breaking  a  bad  promise  than  a  good  one,  although  to  promise  and 
also  to  do  is  better  yet. 

37.  A  man  (Mark  xii:i-i2)  planted  a  vineyard,  hedged  it,  provided 
storage  for  the  wine,  built  a  tower,  let  it  out,  and  travelled  to  a  far 
country.  In  due  time  a  servant  was  sent  to  the  husbandmen  for  rent, 
but  he  was  beaten  and  sent  away  with  nothing.  Another  servant  was 
sent,  who  was  stoned  and  wounded.  A  third  sent  on  the  same  errand 
was  killed,  and  later  many  others  were  sent  who  were  either  beaten 
or  killed.  At  last  the  owner  sent  his  favourite  son,  feehng  that  the 
tenants  would  surely  respect  him.  They,  however,  conferred,  reason- 
ing that,  as  this  was  the  heir,  if  they  killed  him  the  vineyard  would  be 
theirs.  This  they  did  and  cast  him  out.  What,  therefore,  will  the 
lord  and  owner  of  the  vineyard  do?  He  will  destroy  these  tenants  and 
give  the  vineyard  into  other  hands.  Thus  the  stone  rejected  by  the 
builders  becomes  the  chief  stone,  for  such  are  the  marvellous  things  of 
the  Lord.  Those  who  heard  this  parable,  knowing  it  was  against  them, 
sought  to  seize  Jesus  but  feared  the  people  and  so  left  him.  Matthew 
(xxi  133-36)  adds  to  this  narrative,  God's  kingdom  will  be  taken  from 
you  and  given  to  the  nation  bringing  forth  fruits.  Whosoever  falls 
on  this  stone  will  be  broken,  but  he  on  whom  it  falls  will  be  ground  to 
powder.  Luke  (xxig-ig)  also  repeats  the  same  parable  with  only 
shght  differences  of  detail,  this  unique  conformity  indicating  a  common 
older  source,  adding  only  that  when  they  were  told  that  the  vineyard 
would  be  given  to  others  the  people  cried  out,  "  God  forbid.'* 

The  commonest  and  most  frequent  interpretation  makes  the 
vineyard  God's  Kingdom  on  earth.  He  himself  is  the  absent  owner; 
the  Jewish  hierarchy  are  the  tenants;  the  servant-messengers,  prophets; 


THE  PARABLES  OF  JESUS  563 

the  beloved  son,  Jesus;  the  new  tenants,  the  gentile  nations.  On  this 
view  Jesus  foretells  his  own  death,  the  rejection  of  the  Jews,  and  the 
conversion  of  the  gentiles.  It  is  God  who,  having  established  his 
own  plantation,  departs.  The  revolting,  Messiah-murdering  hierarchy 
who  fear  the  people  is  here  definitely  rejected  after  a  manifestation 
of  extreme  patience  on  the  Lord's  part  and  after  repeated  and  cumula- 
tive provocations.  The  so-called  theocracy,  the  chosen  people,  has 
proved  a  usurper.  The  promised  land  is  not  to  be  Jerusalem,  and  the 
people  of  the  covenant  have  forfeited  it.  Israel,  which  thought  itself 
the  elite  among  nations,  is  proscribed,  condemned,  and  executed.  The 
antithesis  some  think  a  double  one,  viz.,  between  the  hierarchy  and 
the  common  people,  and  also  between  the  Jews  and  the  heathen. 

This  proclamation  is  a  mene  tekel  upharsin  for  those  who  have 
betrayed  a  sacred  trust.  The  rejected  stone  (the  Son)  is  reinstated 
and  given  the  chief  place  as  the  Rock  of  Ages.  The  Son's  murderer 
seems  a  vaticinium  ex  eventu,  and  so  the  authenticity  of  the  parable 
has  been  challenged  as  a  product  of  the  theological  thinking  of  the 
primitive  Church  instead  of  the  definite  proclamation  of  Jesus  himself. 
Certainly  the  Jews  never  did  or  would  say  that  Jesus  was  the  heir, 
for  this  would  be  an  acknowledgment  of  his  Sonship,  which  they  never 
made.  He  was  not  slain  as  God's  heir.  Liberal  scholars,  therefore, 
usually  conceive  that  Jesus  gave  some  parable  concerning  a  vineyard, 
but  that  it  was  radically  reconstructed  later;  and  the  very  unanimity 
of  the  synoptists  is  thought  suspicious,  indicating  an  agreement  on 
the  part  of  the  survivors  of  Jesus  to  give  the  fragment  of  tradition 
which  is  at  the  core  of  this  parable  a  Pauline  cast.  It  surely  could  not 
have  come  from  Jesus  in  its  present  form. 

Some  think  that  instead  of  a  direct  conscious  reference  to  Jesus' 
death  we  have  here  only  an  accidental  coincidence  with  no  designed 
allusion,  and  that  the  abuse  and  murder  of  the  servants  refer  to  the 
treatment  meted  out  to  prophets  or  to  the  Baptist.  Of  course,  as  in 
all  the  parables,  its  very  nature  is  only  supposititious,  not  factual,  and 
we  find  little  aid  from  legalistic  or  archaeological  scholarship,  or  indeed, 
from  the  context.  On  its  face  it  seems  minatory  to  a  priesthood  which 
had  arrogated  divine  authority  and  usurped  proprietorship,  where  it 
was  only  vicegerent,  and  which  had  crushed  by  force  reformers,  those 
sent  of  heaven  to  exact  tribute  due  to  the  Supreme  Ruler  whom  they 
should  loyally  serve.  It  very  likely  epitomizes  the  stories  of  prophets 
sent  to  kings  to  remind  them  that  the  state  was  still  a  theocracy  and 
Yahveh  their  liege  lord.  It  is  perhaps  spiritual  rather  than  temporal 
power  that  would  usurp  divine  right  and  dominion,  and  so  it  illustrates 
in  Semitic  wise  the  same  fatal  hubris  or  pride  that  in  Hellenic  story 
always  brought  down  Jove's  thunderbolts  or  invoked  the  avenging 
fates  or  furies.    This  parable  is  a  lighthouse  erected  where  the  sirens 


564  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

of  ambition  lure  to  the  breakers  of  pontifical  assumption.  The  heavenly 
Father  whom  Jesus  revealed,  although  the  God  of  Love,  is  also  the 
jealous  Deity  of  the  old  covenant,  exquisitely  sensitive  to  slight  and 
insult,  and  quite  capable  of  laying  aside  his  clemency  and  wreaking 
vengeance.  Although  afar,  he  is  not  oblivious,  but  will  have  his  due 
and  depose  and  crush  all  faithless  deputies. 

38.  A  king  (Matt,  xxii:  1-14;  Luke  xiv:  15-24)  sent  a  servant  to 
call  the  bidden  guests  to  come  to  the  wedding  of  his  son,  but  they 
refused.  Another  servant  was  sent  to  say  that  the  oxen  and  fatlings 
were  killed  and  all  things  ready;  but  some  of  those  bidden  scornfully 
went  their  way  to  their  farms  and  their  merchandise,  while  others 
abused,  and  even  slew  the  messengers.  Then  the  king  was  wroth,  and 
sent  his  armies,  and  destroyed  the  murderers  and  burned  their  city. 
Servants  were  sent  out  again  to  find  more  worthy  guests,  and  gathered 
from  the  highways  the  good  and  the  bad.  When  the  king  came,  he 
found  one  with  no  wedding  garment,  who  was  speechless  when  asked 
why  he  came  thus.  Him  the  king  ordered  bound  and  cast  into  outer 
darkness  where  there  was  weeping  and  gnashing  of  teeth;  for  many  are 
called  but  few  chosen. 

The  invitation  declined  by  all  on  account  of  other  occupations 
was  repeated  at  the  last  moment  by  the  embarrassed  host;  but  this 
second  time  his  messengers  were  insulted  and  slain,  and  he,  angered, 
wreaked  vengeance  upon  the  recusants.  Then,  as  the  feast  was 
already  prepared,  all  without  distinction  were  invited  to  fill  the  table. 
The  refusers  have  been  identified  with  the  hierarchy,  the  Jewish  race, 
the  rich  or  those  reared  with  Christian  opportunities,  while  those  who 
actually  partook  represent  conversely  the  non-official  Jewry,  the  gen- 
tiles ,  or  those  outside  the  Church  respectively.  On  the  first  two  supposi- 
tions the  destruction  of  the  temple  and  the  fall  of  Jerusalem  or  the  disper- 
sion have  been  thought  to  be  prophesied  in  the  king's  act  of  vengeance. 
This  is,  however,  both  less  certain  and,  if  meant,  less  important,  than 
the  fact  that  Jesus  was  rejected  by  the  rulers  of  the  synagogue.  In 
view  of  this  he  is  alternately  indignant  and  pathetic.  Disappointment 
and  incomplete  foreknowledge  seem  involved  in  the  very  essence  of  this 
parable.  The  invitation  of  those  who  came  is  an  afterthought  as  if 
they  were  heaven's  second  choice.  If  it  worked  well,  then  the  course 
of  events  was  wiser  than  the  king's  original  purpose.  This  tone  of 
disappointment,  indeed,  pervades  much  of  Jesus'  career,  and  there  are 
many  expressions  of  baffling  defeat  which  were  genuine  and  not  af- 
fected.   They  seem  to  make  the  theological  theory  that  he  had  a  clear, 


THE  PARABLES  OF  JESUS  565 

higher  foreknowledge  doubtful;  or,  at  least  those  views  of  his  divinity 
which  interfere  with  his  humanity  and  render  the  incarnation  incom- 
plete. His  primary  intention  was  not  to  be  a  saviour  of  the  gentiles; 
and  we  here  see  in  the  destruction  of  his  rejectors  his  fury  and  unas- 
suaged  indignation.  It  was  an  ominous  threat  by  a  man  of  war  and 
retahation,  not,  however,  without  sufficient  cause.  He  came  to  his 
own  with  a  doctrine  of  Hfe  that  was  the  needed  food  for  their  very  souls, 
but  was  summarily  rejected.  To  prepare  it  had  cost  him  long  and  hard 
travail  of  soul,  and  he  had  felt  assured  it  would  be  welcomed  as  Gospel 
indeed;  but  it  was  met  not  only  with  indifference  but  with  scorn,  and 
so,  as  if  piqued,  his  gift  was  offered  to  and  accepted  by  those  in  whom 
he  had  less  interest.  This  was  also  a  prominent  feature  in  the  ex- 
perience of  Confucius,  Buddha,  and  to  some  extent  Mohammed  and 
is  of  most  foreign  missionaries  to-day.  Their  disciples  were  not  those 
they  most  desired  to  reach.  All  great  reforms  are  marked  by  similar 
discontinuity.  Those  who  are  called  are  not  those  who  come.  New 
races  and  classes  take  up  the  burden  of  progress,  and  the  old  are 
ploughed  under.  This  extension  of  the  scope  of  his  principle  of  new 
bottles  for  new  wine  Jesus  does  not  here  appear  to  see.  It  is  this  that 
makes  every  great  step  in  advance  more  or  less  paroxysmal.  A  fully 
developed  cult  resists  transpeciation,  and  every  appeal  back  to  first 
principles  must  be  to  those  not  preoccupied  but  open  and  candid. 
The  highly  specialized  social  soma  must  die,  and  new  germ  plasma 
must  develop  new  organisms.  In  choosing  as  his  disciples  plain  men 
of  the  people,  and  in  appealing  to  the  masses,  Jesus  recognized  this 
law.  It  is  not  flattering  to  those  who  accepted  his  call  that  they  seem 
to  be  an  afterthought.  But  in  this  parable  it  is  not  they  whom  he 
has  primarily  in  mind.  He  is  addressing  those  in  high  places  in  Israel. 
Thus  here,  as  always,  we  must  remember  that  each  utterance  of  Jesus 
is  aimed  at  a  specific  end,  and  often  he  has  an  individual  or  a  small 
group  only  in  mind.  This  method  is  to  be  evaluated  by  its  efficacy 
for  the  special  purpose  for  which  it  was  used.  Thus  Socrates  felt  to 
the  prytany  and  Luther  to  the  Church  of  his  day. 

The  treatment  of  the  man  without  a  wedding  garment  may  have 
been  aggravated  by  the  king's  indignation  against  the  absentees  and 
suggests  that  one  in  the  new  circle  lacked  appreciation  of  the  honour 
he  received.  The  incident  is  not  easy  to  interpret  conformably  to 
Jesus'  love  of  the  poor  and  his  lack  of  respect  for  forms.  Some  have 
thought  it  showed  that  he  was  not  himself  entirely  emancipated  from 
formality.  Others  have  symbolized  it  as  a  reproof  to  those  who  think 
faith  can  suffice  without  works,  or,  again,  as  referring  to  those  who 
would  accept  the  privileges  of  religion  covertly  without  being  known  to 
others  by  any  outward  badge.  Ritualists  have  even  seen  here  com- 
mendations of  vestments  in  worship,  the  importance  of  which  is 


566  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

measured  by  the  severity  of  the  penalty  for  not  having  them  on.  The 
more  obvious  lesson,  however,  seems  to  be  that  piety  demands  some 
outward  token  by  which  it  can  be  known,  some  external  conformity 
that  distinguishes  the  guests  of  heaven  from  those  in  the  common 
world.  The  extreme  punishment  suggests  that  the  meaning  may  lie 
in  a  still  deeper  stratum  of  life,  and  teaches  that  piety  should  always  be 
clad  in  conduct  and  cannot  be  a  matter  of  mere  sentiment;  that  true 
worship  cannot  dispense  with  outward  forms;  or  that  religion  must 
transform  Hfe.  If,  however,  it  is  the  gentiles  that  are  here  invited, 
the  allusion  gains  a  new  and  interesting  pertinence,  for  their  pagan 
forms  of  worship  would  be  very  likely  to  offend.  On  the  whole,  how- 
ever, we  incHne  to  this  latter  view  that  Jesus  here  reprimands  a  pagan 
novice  in  whom  the  new  faith  had  not  yet  found  a  better  expression, 
but  who  would  adore  the  true  God  under  the  form  of  worship  belonging 
to  Jove,  Ishtar,  Semiramis,  or  some  other  heathen  deity.  If  this  is  the 
pith  of  the  parable,  the  mediaeval  Church  was  lax  in  conforming  to  it, 
and  indeed  it  is  doubtful  if  the  Church  ever  went  as  far  in  tolerating 
the  man  without  the  wedding  garment  as  modern  religious  pedagogy 
and  psychology  would  warrant. 

The  unusual  diversities  both  in  the  settings  and  the  items  of  the 
two  synoptists  have  suggested  to  some  that  Jesus  repeated  this  parable 
on  different  occasions  with  variations,  although  there  is  no  reason  to 
think  that  he  did  this  in  any  case.  More  think  that  it  illustrates 
the  freedom  of  treatment  of  a  single  clear  parable  under  the  influence 
of  strong  allegorizing  propensities,  and  perhaps  that  Luke's  version 
of  it  is  most  elaborate  as  well  as,  of  course,  more  Pauline-Calvinistic. 
A  man  without  a  wedding  garment  some,  e.  g.,  Weiss,  think  a  dis- 
placed reference  to  the  guests  first  invited,  while  others,  e.  g.,  Ewald, 
think  it  a  fragment  of  a  different  but  lost  parable.  It  shows  Jesus' 
high  initial  hope  for  his  race  undergoing  progressive  disillusionment. 

39.  A  farmer  had  a  fig-tree  (Luke  xiii :  6-9)  and  sought^fruit thereon, 
but  found  none  and  told  the  dresser  to  cut  it  down,  as  this  was  the 
third  year  he  had  come  and  found  it  barren;  but  the  dresser  pleaded  for 
one  more  year  in  which  he  would  dig  about  and  dung  it,  and  only  then, 
if  it  was  still  barren,  cut  it  down.  The  impUcation  is  that  this  in- 
tercession prevailed. 

Thus  Jesus,  the  dresser,  pruner,  gardener,  might  plead  with  the 
Yahveh  of  the  Old  Testament  prophets  of  impending  judgment  to 
suspend  it  a  little  longer.  The  tree  might  be  old  and  decayed,  yet  it 
might  bloom  again.  It  may  typify  an  individual,  a  family,  a  Church, 
a  race,  or  all  mankind,  for  in  this  little  silhouette  is  the  multiplicity  of 


THE  PARABLES  OF  JESUS  5^7 

allusion  that  characterizes  most  of  the  parables  that  Jesus  did  not 
himself  explain.  Men,  like  trees,  are  known  by  their  fruits,  which  are 
good  works,  and  in  the  divine  economy  if  a  person  or  institution  is 
sterile  it  has  no  longer  any  raison  d'etre.  But  as  barren  wombs  have 
sometimes  been  made  to  bear,  and  patient  mulching  may  fructify  a 
tree  that  has  for  years  borne  nothing  but  leaves,  so  to  a  religious  com- 
munity that  has  been  unfruitful  there  may  come  a  good  and  prolific 
year  again.  The  barren  tree  has  certainly  borne  so  rich  a  fruitage  of 
song  and  homily  that  the  very  vocabulary  of  Christian  experience 
would  be  impoverished  without  it.  It  teaches  that  the  end  of  life, 
indeed,  the  only  things  that  justify  its  continued  existence,  are  moral 
deeds  and  the  graces  of  religious  character.  God  has  no  other  measure 
or  standard  of  values.  The  luscious  leaves  of  the  fig-tree,  the  old 
pulpiteers  have  told  us,  are  mental  culture,  accompUshments,  knowl- 
edge; but  all  these  are  not  even  worthy  of  mention,  and  are  no  justifi- 
cation for  prolonging  Hfe. 

40.  Ten  virgins  (Matt,  xxv:  13;  Luke  xiii:  25-30)  awaited  sum- 
mons to  a  wedding  by  night.  Five  forgot  to  put  oil  in  their  lamps. 
At  midnight  when  the  bridegroom  was  announced  and  this  omission 
discovered,  the  wise  maidens  refused  to  share  their  oil  lest  there  be 
not  enough  for  both,  while  the  fooHsh  maids  who  had  to  go  back  for  it 
found  on  their  return  that  not  only  was  the  door  shut,  but  they  were 
refused  admission  and  were  told  that  they  were  unknown.  They  were 
not  prepared  for  the  untimed  but  impending  arrival  of  the  Son  of  Man, 
the  heavenly  Bridegroom,  and  the  exhortation  is  to  watch  with  all 
preparations  made  in  advance. 

^  In  its  form  this  is  a  simple  admonition  as  to  schoolgirls  to  be  fore- 
handed and  provident  on  penalty  of  missing  a  festivity  dear  to  every 
maiden  heart.  But  its  content  and  mission  are  a  significant  warning 
to  be  ready  always  for  death  or  for  the  coming  of  the  bridegroom  of 
the  Church  to  his  own.  The  eschatological  motive  is  dominant  and 
loud.  Be  ever  ready,  though  the  hour  steal  on  one  unawares  like  a 
thief  in  the  night.  Had  the  householder  known  at  what  hour  the  burglar 
would  enter  he  would  not  have  suffered  house-break,  and  the  evil  ser- 
vant finding  that  his  lord's  return  was  delayed  would  not  have  beaten 
his  fellow  servants  and  rioted  until,  at  the  unannounced  return,  he  was 
cut  asunder,  and  sent  among  hypocrites  where  there  is  weeping  and 
gnashing  of  teeth.  The  Lord  may  come  suddenly  at  cock-crow  or 
later  and  find  us  sleeping,  as  the  flood  found  men  eating,  drinking,  and 
merrying.    The  coming  of  the  Kingdom  will  find  two  men  in  a  field, 


568  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

two  women  at  a  mill;  one  will  be  taken  and  the  other  left.  We  must 
use  every  safeguard  against  surprise.  This  is  a  drastic,  nerve-tensing, 
anxious  moral.  Even  the  sects  that  have  lived  under  a  sense  of  the 
impending  end  of  all  things,  like  a  Damocles  sword  above  their  heads, 
have  found  easement  in  setting  the  day,  if  not  the  hour,  when  the  crack 
of  doom  was  to  come.  To  live  each  day  and  hour  as  if  it  were  the  last 
has  always  been  a  Christian  rule  of  Hfe.  From  the  Baptist,  Jesus  had 
learned  the  potency  of  interpreting  all  in  terms  of  here  and  now, 
instead  of  putting  everything  important  afar  in  time  and  space. 
Thus  present  realization  was  one  of  the  secrets  of  Jesus'  power  as  well 
as  a  measure  of  it,  as  we  elsewhere  see.  The  very  essence  of  greatness 
is  to  presentify  it,  to  see  everything  actualized  here  and  now  and  in  me. 
This  is  in  a  sense  the  quintessence  of  religion,  and  in  another  way  also 
of  psychology. 

It  is  not  only  hard  to  enter  the  Kingdom,  but  (Luke  xiii:  24-30)  it 
may  be  too  late  before  we  know  it.  When  the  master  has  once  shut 
the  door  the  tardy  seeker  will  knock  and  plead  that  it  may  be  opened, 
but  the  master  of  the  house  will  say,  I  know  you  not.  They  will  urge 
that  they  have  eaten  and  drunk  in  his  presence  and  heard  him  teach  in 
the  street,  and  again  he  will  say,  I  know  you  not.  Depart,  all  ye 
workers  of  iniquity.  They  shall  weep  and  gnash  their  teeth  when  they 
see  Abraham,  Isaac,  Jacob,  and  the  prophets  and  people  from  all  the 
points  of  the  compass,  in  the  Kingdom  and  they  themselves  be  thrust 
out.    Many  that  are  last  shall  be  first  and  the  first  last. 

Open  as  the  entrance  to  the  Kingdom  now  is,  there  will  come  a 
time  when  it  will  be  forever  too  late  to  gain  entrance.  Those  who 
knock  after  this  hour  has  once  struck  will  be  ignored,  condemned,  and 
sent  away.  They  shall  see  the  great  men  of  old  and  many  strangers 
from  afar  that  seem  to  them  interlopers,  with  the  Great  Companion 
whom  they  knew  in  daily  intercourse,  but  he  will  no  longer  have 
compassion  or  hear  their  cry,  and  they  will  be  eternally  banished  from 
his  presence  to  woe.  Though  they  thought  themselves  the  elect, 
they  shall  find  that  they  are  castaways. 

This  hallowed  fable  Jesus  devised,  like  others  of  his  pedagogic 
masterpieces,  to  warn  against  procrastination.  Again  we  hear  the 
tocsin,  now — and  he  paints  in  a  few  strong  strokes  the  consequences 
of  delay.  It  is  hard  to  believe  that  so  sympathetic,  indulgent,  and 
inviting  a  friend,  who  begged  and  pleaded  with  and  would  accept  all, 
will  soon  turn  to  heartless  adamant  against  the  entreaties  of  old  as- 
sociates; but  they  are  forewarned  and  so  will  have  no  excuse  and  must 
not  be  astonished.  This  hardly  seems  to  comport  with  post-mortem 
probation,  and  it  must  be  a  rather  exiguous  exegesis  that  finds  it  here. 
Moral  reforms  seem  to  all  easy,  at  least  for  a  time;  but  habits  grow 
entrenched  and  freedom  fades  from  reahty  to  an  illusion  till,  at  some 


THE  PARABLES  OF  JESUS  569 

awful  but  unknown  moment,  as  we  proceed  along  the  way  of  life  on 
which  no  return  is  possible,  we  pass  the  last  fork  of  the  road  all  unwit- 
tingly. Every  one  has  his  own  moral  dead-line,  one  perhaps  for  each 
besetting  sin,  after  passing  which  there  are  only  might-have-beens, 
regrets,  and  vengeance.  This  ethicodynamic  principle,  drawn  here  as 
Jesus  loved  to  do  in  eschatological  colours,  is  as  true  as  thepsychophysic 
law,  though  not  yet  expressed  in  terms  of  calculus.  The  law  of  pro- 
gressive habituation,  already  among  the  most  interesting  and  practical 
of  the  chapters  in  modern  psychology,  is  outlined  negatively  and  given 
a  moral  point  of  ultimate  reprobation.  This,  too,  is  one  of  the  supports 
of  the  familiar  doctrine  of  grieving  the  Spirit  till  it  takes  its  final  de- 
parture. To  be  almost  persuaded;  to  be  chronically  on  the  brink  of 
the  great  choice  but  never  taking  the  decisive  step,  slowly  creates 
hovering  indecision  as  a  habitus,  well  personified  by  Bunyan  in  Mr. 
Facing-Both-Ways.  The  process  goes  on  without  knowledge  or 
realization,  and  there  slowly  supervenes  the  gradual  abatement  of 
even  desire  for  good,  so  that  Jesus  here,  with  true  artistic  instinct, 
represents  the  seekers  as  realizing  their  position  just  at  the  critical 
moment  after  it  is  too  late,  so  as  to  heighten  the  pathos  of  it  all.  He 
chooses  the  psychological  moment  of  inception  into  the  hopeless  state 
when  hope  and  desire  have  not  yet  faded. 

41.  A  parable  of  the  Kingdom  (Matt,  xx:  1-16)  is  that  of  the  em- 
ployer of  labour  who  engaged  men  at  sLx  in  the  morning  for  a  twelve- 
hour  day,  at  the  stipulated  price  of  a  penny.  At  nine,  twelve,  three, 
and  five  o'clock  he  engaged  others.  Those  employed  at  the  eleventh 
hour,  who  had  wrought  but  one  hour,  were  both  paid  first  and  given 
the  wage  of  an  entire  day.  When,  last  of  all,  those  who  began  earliest 
and  had  borne  the  labour  and  heat  of  the  day  received  only  what  was 
promised,  they  murmured,  not  that  those  who  had  worked  less  time 
were  overpaid  but  that  they  had  themselves  received  no  more  com- 
pensation than  the  contract  price.  The  employer  answered  that  he 
had  kept  his  word;  they  must  be  satisfied;  he  had  a  right  to  do  what  he 
would  with  his  own.  "The  last  shall  be  first  and  the  first  last:  for 
many  be  called,  but  few  chosen." 

The  moral  here  has  some  connection  with  that  of  the  prodigal, 
the  lost  sheep,  and  the  penny.  Those  who  enter  the  Kingdom  late 
have  the  same  usufruct  of  it  and  are  even  preferred,  at  least  in  the 
order  of  payment,  over  those  who  began  early  in  the  morning.  The 
interpretation  is  often  made  that  a  death-bed  repentance  is  as  profit- 
able as  a  life  of  service.     Salvation  is  all  God's  gift  that  he  may  bestow 


570  "^JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

according  to  his  sovereign  pleasure,  and  frail  man  must  not  cavil  or 
repine. 

To  modern  sensibilities  this  lacks  something  of  sweet  reasonable- 
ness, but  so  do  many  of  the  hardships  that  seem  bound  up  with  man's 
relation  to  the  laws  of  nature.  As  a  matter  of  policy  such  practice 
would  soon  bring  confusion  into  any  modern  industrial  group.  The 
warmer  welcome  for  the  tardy  penitent  than  for  one  who  has  never 
fallen  is  a  hard  doctrine.  This  Galilean  fisher  of  men  was  perhaps 
baiting  his  hook  well  to  cast  it  far  over  toward  Satan's  dominions, 
exulting  especially  over  every  catch  drawn  out  of  the  slowly  closing 
net  of  the  great  enemy  over  whom  these  were  trophies  of  victory.  A 
premium  upon  eleven  hours  of  sloth  would  soon  reduce  the  length  of 
the  working-day  to  one  hour:  but  perhaps  this  is  further  than  the  scope 
of  the  parable  goes,  for  the  day  here  represents  the  entire  life  of  man. 

42.  A  man  (Matt,  xxv:  14-30;  Luke  xix:  11-27)  on  travel  bent 
gave  five,  two,  and  one  talents  to  his  servants  according  to  their  abil- 
ity. Those  who  had  five  and  two  respectively  doubled  their  capital, 
but  he  who  had  but  one  hid  it  in  the  earth.  The  master  on  returning 
listens  to  each  and  rewards  the  first  two  alike.  They  have  proven 
faithful  in  a  few,  and  so  are  made  rulers  over  many  things  and  intro- 
duced to  the  Lord's  joy.  The  man  with  one  talent  pleads  in  his 
excuse  that  he  was  afraid  of  the  master,  as  he  was  a  hard  man.  He  is 
told  that  if  the  master  is  exacting,  all  the  more  should  he  at  least  have 
put  out  the  money  to  interest.  As  a  punishment  his  talent  is  taken 
away  and  given  to  the  man  who  has  ten;  for  to  those  who  have  shall 
be  given,  and  from  those  with  little  even  that  shall  be  taken.  The 
profitless  servant  is  then  cast  into  darkness  and  torment. 


Talents  are  the  power  of  doing  good  that  increase  by  use,  and  it  is 
implied  here  that  as  the  man  of  two  was  rewarded  in  the  same  way  as 
was  he  of  five  talents,  so  the  man  of  one,  had  he  doubled  his  gift,  would 
also  have  had  the  same  reward,  proportionately,  as  the  others  would 
have  had  the  same  penalty  had  they  followed  his  course.  Throughout 
Christian  history  perhaps  the  most  pervasive  lesson  of  this  parable 
is  that  there  are  differences  of  abihty  among  men — that  they  are  not 
equal.  Second  to  this,  although  probably  the  chief  meaning  Jesus 
intended  it  to  convey,  was  that  he  of  one  gift  should  strive  as  hard,  and 
by  so  doing  have  equal  merit,  as  he  of  five.  According  to  the  purport 
of  other  parables,  perhaps  he  would  meet  even  greater  reward  than  the 
others,  like  the  eleventh-hour  labourer.  Certainly  the  temptation 
to  inactivity  is  greater  for  him.    He  is,  to  be  sure,  poor  in  spirit,  and 


THE  PARABLES  OF  JESUS  571 

comes  under  a  special  beatitude  which  he  has  not  realized,  but  it  is 
censorious  apathy  like  his  from  which  social  discontent  and  even  an- 
archy sometimes  spring.  Common  average  ability,  and  even  subnor- 
maUty,  thus  carry  no  exemption  from  common  duty. 

In  this,  as  in  the  other  mundane  parables  of  Jesus,  there  is  no  mys- 
tery, and  we  feel  in  the  study  of  them  no  sense  of  superhuman  wisdom. 
All  is  simple,  human,  homely,  clear,  central;  and  nothing  in  the  whole 
sphere  of  morals  is  easier  to  comprehend  or,  we  might  add,  harder  to 
fashion  daily  life  and  thought  upon.  In  our  age  of  the  lust  for  power, 
which  Nietzsche  thinks  man's  supreme  passion,  to  feel  weak  is  supreme 
misery  and  brings  peculiar  temptation  to  balk.  It  has  never  been  so 
discouraging  to  be  small  or  average,  to  renounce  all  distinction  and 
public  applause,  to  live  obscurely  with  content  and  fidelity,  as  in  our 
democratic  days,  when  all  seems  open  to  all  who  can  attain.  Jesus 
was  no  equaUst,  but  he  lashes  the  recusant  and  recreant  who  will  do 
nothing  because  they  cannot  do  much.  Those  of  this  type  who  are 
faithful  indeed  deserve  special  praise;  for  even  if  they  have  not  over- 
come special  temptations  it  is  hard  to  rise  to  their  full  opportunity  to 
live,  which  really  is  found  in  the  possibility  of  living  more  unselfishly, 
tranquilly,  and  with  purer  motives  than  others.  We  wish  Jesus  had 
given  us  also  a  parable  rewarding  a  man  of  one  talent  who  had  used 
it  to  the  uttermost,  for  his  reward  would  doubtless  have  been  greater 
than  that  of  all  the  others. 

43.  In  the  parable  of  the  unjust  steward  (Luke  only,  xvi:  1-13)  a 
rich  man's  agent  is  charged  with  wastefulness  and  summoned  to 
account.  Fearful  of  losing  his  position,  and  being  unable  to  dig  and 
unwilling  to  beg,  he  makes  friends  of  his  master's  creditors  by  summon- 
ing each  and  accepting  from  one  his  note  for  half  and  from  another  for 
four-fifths  of  his  indebtedness.  This  he  does  so  that,  if  he  is  deposed, 
he  may  find  favour  with  those  whose  debt  he  has  dishonestly  reduced 
and  who  are  thus  made  parties  to  his  crime,  and  will  also  be  bound  to 
him  by  ties  of  gratitude.  This  deed,  which  modern  law  has  punished  as 
fraud  for  centuries,  the  master,  who  is  also  a  loser,  commends,  ignoring 
its  injustice  to  him,  because  it  illustrates  sagacity  and  fidehty  to  un- 
righteous Mammon  in  details  which  would  be  commendable  if  the  cause 
were  great  and  just.  A  steward  thus  circumstanced  must  choose  between 
faithfulness  to  the  master  or  to  his  debtors,  for  he  cannot  serve  both. 

This  has  never  been  a  favourite  parable  for  the  pulpit,  and  often 
seems  the  despair  of  exegetes  and  ethical  apologists.  Some  have  even 
thought  it  misunderstood  or  misreported.    The  latter  part  of  the 


572  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

narrative  appears  either  to  have  covert  connotation  or  to  reflect  a 
confused  state  of  mind  on  Luke's  part.  A  few  negative  critics  have  not 
only  challenged  Jesus'  soundness  here,  but  have  charged  him  with 
commending  flagrant  and  palpable  chicanery,  and  have  hinted  that 
in  his  Oriental  environment  Jesus'  conceptions  of  equity  and  business 
integrity  had  remained  undeveloped.  Others  more  favourably  dis- 
posed interpret  the  owner  as  God  and  the  steward  as  Jesus,  the  great 
remitter  of  man's  debts  of  sin;  but  this  has  difficulties,  for  Jesus'  stew- 
ardship is  not  imperilled  nor  is  he  obliged  to  choose  between  fidelity 
to  sinful  man  and  to  his  Lord.  Neither  is  there  any  reason  to  think  that 
he  would  commend  such  methods  of  equalizing  wealth.  Instead  of 
collecting  debts  that  creditors  acknowledge  to  be  just,  the  steward 
conspires  with  them  to  defraud,  thus  corrupting  them,  and  while  he 
himself  does  not  directly  share  the  spoils  of  the  rebates,  he  expects  to 
receive  the  full  value  in  good  will  and  favours,  should  he  need  them. 
If  we  assimae  the  rich  lord  to  be  Satan  himself  as  the  prince  of  this 
world,  and  the  creditors  those  sold  under  sin  whose  obHgations  to  him 
Jesus  reduces,  then  we  have  a  meaning  which  comports  well  with  the 
mediaeval  conception,  which  long  abounded  in  many  a  monkish  tale  of 
duping  and  outwitting  the  devil.  But  on  such  a  view  we  cannot  ex- 
plain the  lord's  commendation  of  the  act.  The  moral  context  welters 
with  confusion.  Again,  Jesus,  it  has  been  said,  was  an  unpractical 
ideahst  who  felt  strongly  the  need  of  more  of  the  same  worldly  sagacity 
in  the  administration  of  the  affairs  of  the  Kingdom  that  controls 
mundane  affairs,  and  if  this  be  so  the  parable  is  a  crude  expression 
crudely  reported  of  this  conviction.  Still  others  have  thought  that 
Jesus  here  and  elsewhere  implies  that  property  is  robbery,  and  so  pitied 
poor  creditors  that  he  commends  even  questionable  means  toward  the 
more  equitable  distribution  of  wealth.  Wendt^  says  this  prudent 
agent  is  commended  for  providing  by  present  needs  for  his  future 
welfare.  We  must  so  use  the  goods  God  entrusts  to  us  to  secure  heav- 
enly reward.  The  Lord  owns  all;  we  are  only  his  trustees,  and  instead 
of  wasting  the  fiduciary  resources  in  our  hands  we  should  use  them  in 
conciliating  the  claims  of  those  who  owe  us.  By  these  means  if  we  are 
reduced  to  beggary  we  shall  have  deposits  in  the  bank  of  their  gratitude. 
Thus  we  have  here  counsel  to  spendthrifts  foreseeing  utter  bank- 
ruptcy and  providing  for  it  by  liberality  to  their  friends  while  they  yet 
have  the  means.  But  at  best  the  parable  is  tortuous  and  confused, 
inconsistent  with  the  teaching  of  the  other  parables  of  husbandmen  and 
their  agents,  and  either  belonging  to  the  decadent  stage  of  Jesus' 
parable  method  of  teaching  or,  probably,  an  imperfect  record  not 
understood  by  Luke;  and,  at  any  rate,  as  it  now  stands,  of  but  the 
slightest  significance  to  us. 

x"The  Teaching  of  Jesus."  I,  p.  23s,  H.  P-  377- 


THE  PARABLES  OF  JESUS  573 

44.  Of  all  the  parables,  the  number  of  which  is  estimated-  accord- 
ing to  different  criteria  all  the  way  from  thirty- two  by  Briggs  to  fifty- 
three  by  JuHcher,  the  one  most  classic  in  form,  clearest  in  meaning, 
possibly  the  first,  and  at  any  rate  the  one  which  Jesus  himself  explained 
most  fully,  is  that  of  the  sower  (Matt,  xiii:  3-32;  Luke  viii:  5-15).  As 
he  sowed,  some  seed  fell  by  the  roadside  and  was  trodden  down  or  de- 
voured by  fowls.  The  word  is  heard,  but  Satan  snatches  it  away  lest 
it  be  imderstood  and  believed  unto  salvation. 

The  beaten  path  is  the  heart  waxed  gross,  the  eye  that  sees  not, 
and  the  ear  that  hears  not.  Spiritual  dullards  are  utterly  unimpres- 
sionable and  hopeless,  and  perhaps  this  refers  to  the  scribes  and  Phar- 
isees, whose  souls  the  devil  had  seared.  Wasted  and  unappreciated 
truths  are  like  pearls  before  swine,  and  great  teachers  like  Plato  have 
shrunk  from  proclaiming  their  best  truths  to  those  utterly  unfit  to  re- 
ceive them.  Souls  smitten  with  the  mildew  of  nil  admirari  and  indif- 
ference, who  abhor  all  that  is  new,  have  always  been  the  terror  of  great 
teachers  and  reformers.  Dread  of  them  has  caused  all  the  differentia- 
tions that  have  been  made  between  exoteric  and  esoteric  teachings, 
and  had  something  to  do  in  leading  Jesus  to  devise  his  own  invention 
of  a  new  type  of  parable  which,  like  a  cathedral  window,  looks  dull  and 
dingy  to  those  without,  but  to  those  within  is  beautiful  with  light. 
Of  all  the  conservatives,  reactionaries,  and  obscurantists,  moral  and 
religious  cynics  are  the  worst;  and  who  that  is  smitten  with  the  love 
of  the  ideal  does  not  shrink  from  their  presence  as  from  profanation? 
They  chill,  blight,  disenchant,  are  precipitate  to  criticise  before  they 
understand.  The  preachers  of  the  simple  life  in  "Vanity  Fair";  of 
exiguous  honesty  to  the  promoters  of  frenzied  finance;  of  exquisite 
chastity,  even  in  thought,  in  the  gilded  halls  of  licensed  prostitution; 
of  philosophic  temperance  in  a  saloon;  of  the  conclusions  of  science  con- 
cerning the  ultimate  constitution  of  the  universe  to  the  superstitious 
and  ignorant,  are  sowing  by  the  wayside  and  wasting  both  effort  and 
seed,  for  those  whom  they  address  are,  at  the  best,  hearers  only  and  not 
doers.  Perhaps  Plato  might  have  given  them  some  credit  because  he 
held  that  theory  goes  part  way  toward  practice;  but  for  Jesus  even  a 
Httle  knowing  without  doing  only  adds  condemnation.  The  seed  does 
not  even  sprout,  but  feeds  the  enemies  of  the  crops. 

Second,  there  are  stony  places  with  poor  and  shallow  soil  where 
the  word  is  heard  and  received  with  joy;  but  when  the  sun  of  tribula- 
tion, persecution,  or  temptation  is  hot,  the  tender  shoot  withers  to  the 
root.  The  impregnation  of  souls  thus  symboUzed  is  followed  by  early 
miscarriage.  Offence  and  abortion  are  easy.  The  superficial  who  pave 
hell  with  good  intentions;  the  neologists,  or  culturists  ever  seeking 


574  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

some  new  thing;  people  with  quick  perceptions,  easy  apprehension, 
ready  expression,  with  a  veritable  lust  for  the  easy  first  stages  of  knowl- 
edge and  with  as  veritable  an  aversion  for  thoroughness;  those  with 
only  the  dry  light  of  intelligence,  in  whose  souls  there  is  no  irrigation 
or  even  seepage  from  deep  perdurable  enthusiasm  which  is  the  water  of 
life;  the  neuroticism  that  always  loves  to  begin  and  never  can  finish — 
these  constitute  a  true  psychic  type  which  is  alternately  the  hope  and 
exasperation  of  the  true  teacher.  The  religious  smatterers  and  back- 
sliders who  put  their  hands  to  the  plow  and  turn  back;  who  begin  to 
build  without  counting  the  cost;  who  take  lamps  with  no  oil  in  them; 
who  say  "I  go,"  but  go  not;  who  are  almost  but  not  quite  persuaded; 
who  in  youth  give  precocious  promise  which  is  never  fulfilled — these, 
no  doubt,  were  often  the  despair  of  Jesus,  and  it  was  such  followers 
who  discouraged  Buddha  and  angered  Mohammed.  This  class  illus- 
trates dementia  prsecox  in  religion.  Their  piety  is  a  kind  of  air-plant, 
perhaps  an  annual  rather  than  a  perennial  growth.  It  was  those  of 
this  diathesis  who  balked  at  martyrdom  in  the  early  Church,  and  have 
made  up  the  great  body  of  recanters.  Here  the  mediaeval  dogmatists 
found  the  true  sin  against  the  Holy  Ghost.  ^  This  is  often,  too,  the 
tragedy  of  great  truth  for  Httle  minds,  of  all-sided  culture  for  cheap 
souls  or  those  with  a  single  facet.  The  Gospel  seed  can  never  ripen  on 
thin  soil  which  cannot  improve  itself.  Thus,  back  of  this  parable 
there  perhaps  lurks  a  fatalism  that  makes  the  redemption  of  such  acre- 
age impossible.  To  raise  such  a  question,  however,  is  to  press  the  par- 
able beyond  its  legitimate  scope. 

The  third  class  of  hearers  is  parabled  as  thorny  ground  where 
weeds  and  tares  representing  the  care,  riches,  and  lust  of  worldly 
things  spring  up  and  choke  the  wheat.  These,  another  parable  teaches, 
cannot  be  removed  without  uprooting  the  crop.  Here  the  soil  is  rich 
and  deep,  but  rank  with  other  growths  sown  perhaps  at  night  by  the 
devil,  the  god  of  weeds.  The  guilt  of  this  class  is  clearer,  for  not  talent 
but  will  is  lacking.  In  place  of  the  summum  honum  they  have  chosen 
seciinda  bona  or  at  best  moral  allotria.  There  is  no  conscious  noluntas 
for  good,  but  only  voluntas  for  other  things — ^perhaps  the  will  to  power, 
fame,  wealth.  Their  high  ideaUsm  has  faded  into  the  hght  of  common 
day,  and  in  its  place  have  come  sordid  greed,  tuft-hunting  and  pelf- 
hunting.  They  have  apostatized  to  other  gods,  or  their  piety  is  smoth- 
ered in  some  isolated  compartment  of  the  soul  where  it  is  dormant  save 
on  Sundays  or  in  stereotyped  ways.  Business  has  supplanted  Bethel. 
Religion,  which  should  be  supreme,  is  subordinate.  They  have  de- 
.  cHned  the  Bridegroom's  invitation  with  many  an  excuse,  and  have  be- 
come servitors  of  practical  utilities,  worshippers  of  Mammon,  and  so 
the  way  to  heaven  has  narrowed  down  for  them  to  the  dimensions  of  a 

'See  one  of  the  most  desperate  and  pathetic  illustrations  m  the  account  of  f  ranccsca  Spiera  by  Philip  Schaff,  "Di« 
SUnde  wieder  den  Ueiligen  GeisU"    Uallc,  i34i,  p.  173-310 


THE  PARABLES  OF  JESUS  575 

needle's  eye.  One  world  at  a  time,  and  now  this,  is  perhaps  their 
maxim.  To-day  in  academic  life  it  is  this  class  who  ask  the  money 
value  of  studies  and  courses,  and  disregard  culture  values.  A  life  of 
high  Hving  and  plain  thinking  has  no  charm  for  such.  They  build 
barns,  lay  up  store  of  goods,  eat  and  drink,  and  forget  that  their  souls 
may  at  any  moment  be  required  of  them. 

Lastly,  fertile  soil  stands  for  those  who  hear,  understand,  and  do; 
those  who  have  waited,  longed,  and  are  ripe  and  ready  for  the  word; 
the  wise  to  whom  a  hint  is  sufficient,  for  whom  even  parables  are  hardly 
needed,  and  who  intuit  at  once  their  meaning  and  are  fittest  for  esoteric 
impartations  by  the  rich  and  condensed  language  of  hints  and  chapter 
heads.  Tribulation  only  increases  their  faith,  and  conviction  is 
prompt,  complete,  and  lasting.  All  that  sprouts  comes  to  full  fruit- 
age. The  law  was  originally  written  on  their  hearts,  and  needs  only 
a  touch  to  bring  it  out  in  consciousness.^ 

This  brilliant  parable  is  the  key  to  several  others,  and  supple- 
ments much  other  teaching.  There  is  nothing  enigmatical  about  it, 
and  perhaps  it  least  needed  Jesus'  exposition.  Dull  indeed  must  have 
been  the  disciples  who  required  this  detailed  explanation  of  it.  These 
four  kinds  of  ground  stand  for  four  pedagogic  temperaments  as  char- 
acteristic and  distinct  as  any  of  the  types  of  modern  genetic  psychology 
or  ethology.  Every  teacher  of  new  and  higher  truths  could  supply  a 
generous  anthology  of  illustrations  of  each  one  of  the  four  from  his  own 
experience.  Indeed,  these  supplement  our  present  knowledge  of  the 
psychology  of  the  learning  process  somewhat  as  Plato's  myths  do  his 
philosophy.  These  are  ways  in  which  education  does  or  fails  to  do  its 
proper  work  of  supplementing  heredity.  These  are  the  four  great 
reactions  of  the  soul  to  truth.  Here  all  the  Herbartian  interests 
may  be  subsumed.  Pedagometric  scales  might  best  be  established 
along  these  lines.  This  is  Jesus'  confession  of  his  educational  policy, 
and  it  probably  gives  us  a  key  to  the  principles  on  which  he  chose 
his  disciples  and  the  Seventy,  focussing  his  best  endeavours  on  the 
inner  group  of  the  fourth  class,  for  the  mostly  lost  and  unrecorded 
instruction  of  whom  the  world  must  forever  mourn.  Had  this  been 
accessible,  how  different  the  conceptions  of  Christendom  concerning 
his  Ufe  and  work  might  have  been,  and  what  labour  of  painfully  recon- 
structing from  popular  utterances  his  inmost  creed  might  have  been 
saved! 

The  wealth  of  pedagogic  experience  and  insight  in  these  few 
apothegmatic  phrases  is  nothing  less  than  amazing.  In  this  confessional 
revelation  we  get  nearest  to  the  heart  of  the  Great  Teacher  and  can 
realize  how  deeply  he  must  have  pondered  the  ways  and  means  of 
impressing  his  doctrine,  as  he  had  to  do,  without  the  aid  of  writing, 

■Tradition  would  have  us  infer  that  Jesus'  teAching  is  illustrated  by  the  definition  of  a  college  as  Mark  Hopkins  on 
one  end  of  a  log  teaching  Garfield  on  the  other. 


576  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

tests,  or  organizing  a  mere  school  in  the  classic  sense.  How  apt  for 
his  and  for  all  subsequent  time  was  his  choice  of  the  agricultural  simile 
of  grain-growing!  One  wonders  whether  Jesus  felt  that  all  these  types 
were  illustrated  among  his  own  disciples.  In  this  parable  no  censure 
of  any  of  these  four  classes  is  implied  for  it  is  all  a  question  of  native 
quaUty,  of  unfertihzed  soil.  The  seed  always  and  everywhere  grows 
as  best  it  can,  and  it  is  only  inherited  ability  typified  by  the  soil  that 
differs.  Elsewhere,  but  not  here,  are  manuring,  digging  about  the 
roots,  and  pulling  up  tares  considered.  Here  Jesus  seems  almost 
fatalistically  resigned  as  to  the  nature  of  the  soil,  and  this  was  doubt- 
less his  attitude  as  to  the  very  diverse  endowments  of  his  immediate 
followers.  From  the  nature  of  the  records  of  his  life,  and  from  his 
frequent  rebukes  of  dullness  of  apprehension  on  the  part  of  his  fol- 
lowers, must  we  not  infer  that  he  had  most  of  all  at  heart  yet  another 
or  fifth  kind  of  companions  who  could  not  be  classified  by  a  figure  of 
speech  drawn  from  the  domain  of  vegetable  life,  viz.,  those  who  dimly 
felt  the  power  of  the  truth  he  taught  and  strove  to  their  uttermost  to 
comprehend  but  constantly  fell  short,  and,  owing  to  their  inherent 
limitations,  incessantly  misconceived  him?  With  Boswellian  devo- 
tion, but  with  a  pragmatic  shortage  of  understanding  sometimes  sug- 
gesting even  the  typical  pedant  of  Faust,  these  biographers  could  be 
only  fags  of  the  Holy  Ghost  while  striving  to  their  uttermost  to  be 
its  oracles,  understanding  even  the  parables  only  when  an  explanation 
was  vouchsafed  them.  Would  that  Jesus  had  left  us  his  own  luminous 
explanation  of  other  of  his  parables  instead  of  trusting  them  or  us  to 
supply  it!  Indeed,  it  seems  strange,  incompetent  as  their  comments 
upon  his  teachings  often  show  them  to  be  to  give  such  interpretation, 
that  if  he  had  any  forefeeling  that  his  inculcations  were  to  be  trans- 
mitted to  future  generations,  he  did  not  more  often  explain  himself. 

45.  The  Kingdom  (Mark  iv:  26-9)  is  as  when  a  man  casts  seed 
into  the  ground,  goes  to  sleep,  and  rises  day  after  day,  while  the  seed 
springs  up  and  grows,  he  knows  not  how,  whether  he  wakes  or  sleeps. 
The  earth  bringeth  forth  fruit  of  itself,  the  blade,  the  ear,  and  the 
full  com;  but  when  the  fruit  is  ripe,  man  puts  in  his  sickle  to  the 
harvest. 

The  growth  impulse  of  nature  supplements  the  work  of  man. 
The  seed  seems  buried  in  the  dark,  cold  earth  till  the  springtide  when 
nature  rises  again,  and  it  sprouts  and  grows  all  sunmier.  Man  sleeps, 
but  nature  does  not.  We  know  not  how  the  great  spirit  of  life  works. 
It  is  thus,  however,  that  the  Kingdom  grows  by  the  profound  laws  of 
evolution  far  below  consciousness,  if  we  only  plant  good  seed  betimes. 


THE  PARABLES  OF  JESUS  577 

The  Kingdom,  then,  here  is  like  a  crop.  Nothing  is  said  of  the  nature 
of  the  soil,  of  fertilizing,  watering,  or  weeding;  but  the  stress  is  on  the 
growth  impulse  of  which  man  avails  himself,  and  this  growth  is  here 
and  not  hereafter.  The  Kingdom  will  grow  and  ripen  inevitably  with- 
out attention  on  man's  part,  as  if  it  were  in  the  inmost  nature  of  things 
to  do  so.  Man  must  do  his  part,  and  God  and  nature  will  do  the  rest. 
Man  does  not  even  need  to  watch.  Growth  proceeds  very  slowly  and 
surely,  stage  by  stage.  Such  has  been  the  law  ever  since  cibiculture 
and  the  domestication  of  plants  began. 

This  parable  is  often  thought  to  symbolize  the  part  that  good 
impressions  play  if  made  upon  the  soul  very  early  in  Hfe — which,  even 
though  they  seem  to  be  lost,  are  really  germinant.  Although  those  in 
whose  hearts  they  are  growing  know  it  not,  they  will  bring  harvest  of 
good  deeds  in  time.  From  this  point  of  view  we  are  deaHng  with  the 
under  or  unconscious  soul  in  man,  which  once  fructified  does  the  rest 
of  itself.  This  parable,  therefore,  seems  to  be  strongly  anti-Pauhne, 
for  it  means  that  the  inborn  nature  of  man  is  pure  and  good  in  itself, 
and  not  depraved  or  corrupt.  Thus,  not  only  our  vegetative  and 
autonomous  but  also  our  instinctive  and  intuitive  nature,  receives 
seed  like  good  ground,  and  stimulates  it  to  grow  and  ripen.  This  is 
quite  in  accord  with  the  later  psychogenetic  and  psychoanalytic  view 
of  the  prepotency  of  infantile  impressions;  for  the  unconscious  in  us 
is  the  childlike,  and  the  childlike  is  the  unconscious.  No  good  in  this 
plastic  age  is  lost. 

46.  Another  parable  which  Jesus  himself  explained  is  that  of  the 
tares  (Matt,  xiii:  24-30  and  36-43).  The  Kingdom  is  like  a  man  who 
sowed  good  grain,  but  while  his  workmen  slept  an  enemy  sowed  tares, 
so  that  both  sprang  up  together.  The  servants  came  to  the  owner  and 
asked,  Did  you  not  sow  good  seeds;  whence,  then,  these  tares?  He 
replied  that  an  enemy  had  done  it.  When  asked  whether  they  should 
pluck  up  the  tares  he  said,  No,  lest  the  wheat  also  be  uprooted.  Both 
must  grow  until  the  harvest,  and  then  the  reapers  will  be  ordered  first 
to  gather  the  tares,  bundle,  and  burn  them,  and  then  bring  the  wheat 
to  the  barn. 

When  he  had  sent  the  multitude  away  and  the  disciples  were  alone, 
they  asked  him  to  explain,  which  he  did  by  saying  that  the  sower  is  the 
Son  of  man;  the  field  is  the  world;  the  good  seeds  are  the  children  of 
the  Kingdom;  the  tares,  of  the  wicked  one;  the  enemy  that  sowed  them, 
the  devil;  the  harvest,  the  end  of  the  world;  the  reapers,  the  angels,  sent 


578  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

forth  to  gather  sinners,  who  would  be  cast  into  a  furnace  with  wailing 
and  gnashing  of  teeth,  while  the  righteous  should  shine  as  the  sun  in 
the  Kingdom. 

Here  again  Jesus  is  the  sower,  and  the  seed  is  growing  according 
to  its  soil;  but  by  a  scurvy  trick  the  god  of  weeds  steals  in  by  night  and 
inseminates  the  ground  with  his  undomesticated,  outlawed  crop;  and, 
contrary  to  the  mediaeval  legends,  wherein  he  is  always  worsted,  he 
here  outwits  the  Lord,  so  much  so  that  before  the  latter  knows  it, 
the  weeds  have  taken  such  root  that  to  pull  them  will  uproot  the  crop, 
the  more  as  the  more  abundant  and  rank  are  the  weeds.  Thus,  as 
the  mischief  is  done,  nothing  remains  but  to  await  and  harvest  what 
of  the  crop  is  unchoked,  and  burn  the  Unkraut,  as  in  John's  preaching 
the  winnowed  out  chaff  is  burned;  or,  as  elsewhere  from  a  full  net  the 
good  fish  are  saved  and  the  bad  thrown  away.  Here  forbearance 
and  the  awful  fate  of  the  wicked  are  set  forth.  It  is  not  here  taught 
that  good  needs  evil  to  bring  it  to  full  maturity,  but  God's  tolerance 
of  sin  is  ascribed  to  his  tenderness  for  the  good.  Against  the  faith 
of  ancient  Israel  it  is  here  frankly  assumed  that  sin  is  not  punished 
in  the  present  life;  though  here  the  parable,  if  taken  too  literally, 
halts  a  Uttle,  for  many  weeds  may  be  uprooted  to  the  advantage  of 
many  a  crop  without  serious  jeopardy,  as  society  often  promptly  pun- 
ishes evil,  not  only  without  injury  to  the  good  but  to  its  great  advan- 
tage. If  the  tares  and  weeds  are  not  persons,  as  we  are  told  they  are, 
but  qualities  in  each  individual,  the  meaning  becomes  in  some  sense 
clearer.  It  is  vain,  however,  to  speculate  what  would  happen  if  all 
the  human  tares  were  weeded  out  by  Divine  Providence.  A  fatalism, 
too,  is  implied,  because  the  tares  cannot  be  transmuted  into  grain, 
but  from  each  seed  only  its  like  can  grow.  Hence,  the  implication 
would  make  Jesus'  mission  to  save  the  lost  nugatory.  The  purport, 
however,  is  consoUng  because  of  the  certainty  of  the  future  penalty 
of  the  wicked  after  their  lush  and  unpunished  life  here.  Even  where 
sin  abounds  we  must  not  doubt  the  ultimate  justice  or  doom  of  e\'il. 
This  is  another  form  of  the  draft  Jesus  so  often  loved  to  draw  on  the 
great  bank  of  the  future,  failure  of  which  would  have  left  him  and  his 
cause  bankrupt  indeed.  Its  credit  is  called  faith,  and  his  system  of 
doing  business  with  it  is  what  we  call  eschatology.  The  key-word  of 
this  parable  is.  Wait;  possess  your  souls  in  patience.  The  evil  are  but 
laying  up  wrath,  and  the  longer  the  delay  the  more  terrible  it  \vill  be 
when  it  comes.  Heavenly  laws  work  slowly  but  surely.  Sin  will 
end,  not  by  the  gradual  selective  process  of  elimination  of  the  unfit, 
and  the  natural  survival  of  the  fittest;  but  at  a  certain  point  there  will 
be  a  supernal  intervention  of  divine  agents  with  fearful  and  swift 
execution  of  judgment.     Here  again,  despite  the  injunction  to  patience, 


THE  PARABLES  OF  JESUS  579 

we  see  Jesus'  convulsive  or  catastrophic  diathesis.  At  a  certain  point 
the  powers  of  righteousness  will  break  loose  and  sweep  away  all  that 
offend,  with  the  besom  of  destruction.  Over  and  over  again  he  tells 
of  weeping,  waihng,  gnashing  of  teeth,  fire,  sword,  thunder,  Hghtning, 
earthquake;  so  that  nothing  in  all  earth's  sad  litany  of  woes  and  horrors 
is  in  his  view  too  terrible  for  the  foes  of  the  Kingdom,  and  the  world 
lives  in  the  aura  of  a  great  convulsion  from  which  a  new  earth  is  to 
emerge  like  a  butterfly  from  the  ugly  chrysalis.  The  great  metamor- 
phosis doubtless  seemed  to  him  now  near,  now  farther  away,  but  rarely 
beyond  the  Hfe  of  some  then  living,  and  he  eagerly  scanned  earth, 
heaven,  and  the  souls  of  men  for  signs  and  foregleams  of  its  coming. 
Despite  its  terrors  it  was  a  consummation  to  be  devoutly  wished  and 
prayed  for.  This  tension  between  the  real  world  and  that  of  his  ideals 
grew  painful  at  times.  Such  polar  opposition  would  at  some  point 
become  insupportable;  and  then,  when  the  crisis  came,  all  who  offended 
would  be  destroyed  in  dreadful  but  rapid  stages  and  the  chosen 
would  shine  forth,  for  the  glorified  world  could  produce  no  tares  or 
weeds. 

So  far  this  article  in  the  program  of  Jesus  is  unfulfilled,  and  many 
a  crop  of  tares  and  wheat  in  varying  proportions  has  grown  together 
for  two  millennia.  The  Christian  world  has  everywhere  practically 
ceased  to  expect  a  harvest  of  fire.  The  conception  of  it  has  become 
impotent,  and  if  it  is  anywhere  held  to  it  is  relegated  to  the  post- 
mortem world.  The  method  of  evolution  has  discredited  that  of  revo- 
lution, although  if  the  best  only  survive,  the  result  is  even  more 
certain  though  longer  deferred.  The  essentials  of  Jesus'  faith  are 
confirmed,  and  the  minor  matters  of  means  and  method  changed. 
Impetuous  souls  like  his,  with  perf  ervid  ethical  passion,  still  occasionally 
lose  their  temporal  perspective  and  see  all  that  they  hope  and  strive 
for  near  at  hand.  But  the  more  we  study  this  psychosis,  the  more 
clearly  we  see  that  Jesus'  belief  was  no  distemper,  but  only  a  con- 
science inflamed  with  true  zeal,  putting  our  own  faith  in  the  form 
which  perhaps  at  his  age  was  both  most  artistic  and  morally  effective. 
Thus  optimists  have  still  but  to  foUow  the  council  of  this  parable, 
wait  without  doubting,  and  never  cease  to  sow  good  seed  for  fear  of 
the  weeds  of  diabolus. 

47.  The  Kingdom  (Matt,  xiii:  47-50)  is  like  a  net  cast  into  the 
sea,  gathering  all;  and  when  it  was  full  they  drew  it  ashore,  and  sat 
down  and  gathered  the  good  into  vessels  and  threw  the  bad  away. 
So,  at  the  end  of  the  world,  the  angels  shall  sever  the  wicked  from  the 
just,  and  cast  them  into  a  furnace  where  there  shall  be  weeping  and 
gnashing  of  teeth. 


58o  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

Selection  is  the  theme  here.  Sorting  weeds  from  grain,  chaff  from 
wheat,  leaves  from  fruit,  symbolizes  what  might  as  well  be  illustrated 
by  parting  small,  rotten,  pest-injured  specimens  of  any  kind  of  crop, 
wild  or  cultivated,  from  those  that  are  perfect,  or  dross  from  good 
metal,  or  inferior  or  diseased  animals  of  every  kind  from  those  best 
fitted  to  survive;  and  the  same  prmciple  of  sortage  might  be  applied 
to  human  famiUes  and  races.  Evolution  is  always  doing  this.  We 
might  now  interpret  the  Church  as  the  net  gathering  fish  from  the 
world,  and  some  have  suggested  a  proportion  between  the  relatively 
few  fish  caught  in  a  net  compared  to  the  vast  numbers  in  the  sea,  and 
those  really  Christian  compared  to  the  population  of  the  world.  Some 
think  the  Church  the  vessel  in  which  the  good  are  put.  So,  too,  opin- 
ions differ  as  to  what  the  catch  itself  is.  It  may  be  death,  and  the 
sorting  may  be  the  judgment.  At  any  rate,  it  is  now  too  late  to 
convert  bad  works  into  good;  for  the  fish  are  already  dead,  and  have 
only  to  be  separated.  Perhaps  there  are  as  many  standards  of  selec- 
tion as  there  are  species  of  fish.  Bad  fish  are  very  bad  and  very  dan- 
gerous, and  this  fact  may  have  been  an  unconscious  determinant  and 
contributed  its  quota  of  reinforcement. 

48.  The  Kingdom  of  heaven  (Matt,  xiii:  31-32 ;  Luke  xiii:  18-19) 
is  like  a  grain  of  mustard  seed,  the  least  of  all  seeds,  sown  in  the  earth. 
But  when  it  is  grown  up  it  is  the  greatest  of  all  herbs,  and  the  fowls  of 
the  air  can  lodge  m  its  branches.  Again,  it  is  like  leaven  (Matt,  xiii: 
33;  Luke  xiii:  20-21)  which  a  woman  hid  in  three  measures  of  meal  till 
all  was  leavened. 

This  optimism  takes  no  heed  of  any  adverse  influences.  The  tiny 
seed  becomes  a  very  great  tree,  and  the  leaven  pervades  the  whole 
mass.  Scholars  have  found  out  that  in  Palestine  mustard  never 
grows  more  than  twelve  feet  high  and  that  birds  never  nest  in  it,  and 
so  other  authorities  have  believed  that  another  larger  tree-like  plant 
{Sahadora  persica)  was  here  suggested,  which  has  some  similar  quali- 
ties, and  which  often  grows  twenty-five  feet  high,  bearing  berries  which 
birds  love.  If  the  tree  is  the  Church  this  is  somewhat  more  fit,  but 
hyperbole  is  still  involved.  A  mustard  seed  was  in  current  Hebrew 
proverbs  a  symbol  of  smallness;  yet  many  think  Jesus'  botanical 
knowledge  was  here  at  fault.  Other  exegetes  have  dwelt  on  the  taste, 
colour,  form,  medical  effects,  of  mustard  seed  in  a  very  irrelevant  if 
ingenious  way,  but  the  meaning  that  from  small  beginnings  great 
things  arise  is  the  central  thought.  Some  say  the  tree  is  the  Messiah, 
others  that  it  is  the  very  few  true  behevers;  the  ground  is  the  earth 
or  its  people;  the  birds  of  the  air  are  the  population  of  all  cUmes  that 


THE  PARABLES  OF  JESUS  581 

enter  the  Kingdom,  etc.  Some  think  that  the  tree  is  Paul,  and  others, 
the  Gospel.  The  leaven  is  a  more  culinary  parable,  the  ephah  being 
the  largest  of  the  then-current  standards  of  measurement.  It  suggests 
a  departure  from  the  unleavened  bread  sacred  to  the  Hebrews.  Hea- 
thenism, too,  is  about  to  be  leavened.  It  signifies  fermentation. 
Both  of  these  parables  mean  only  that  Jesus'  ideal  will  be  completely 
accomplished,  and  we  are  here  simply  given  a  convenient  and  portative 
expression  for  the  current  growth  and  universal  prevalence  of  the 
new  dispensation,  so  humble  in  its  beginnings.  Its  development  is 
to  be  quiet,  without  convulsion  and  unobserved.  It  should  be  re- 
membered that  Jesus  here  is  not  philosophical  but  prophetic. 

49.  The  Kingdom  of  heaven  (Matt,  xiii:  44-47)  is  like  a  treasure 
hid  in  a  field,  having  found  which,  a  man  keeps  secret  but  sells  all  he 
has  and  buys  the  field.  Or  again,  it  is  like  a  man  seeking  precious 
pearls,  who  having  found  one  of  the  greatest  value  sells  all  he  has  to 
buy  it. 

As  one  sacrifices  all  minor  treasures  for  one  very  great  one,  so  all 
else  should  be  gladly  given  up  for  the  Kingdom.  For  its  sake  every- 
thing ought  to  be  renounced.  Such  a  procedure  is  only  business 
shrewdness.  Perhaps  the  secrecy  concerning  the  field  containing  the 
treasure  is  aimed  at  the  exclusiveness  of  the  Jews,  while  some  think  that 
this  refers  to  the  inwardness  of  the  higher  fife.  Both  find  the  prize 
and  set  its  true  high  worth  upon  it.  There  is  here  no  tedious  seeking, 
but  having  found,  there  is  the  greatest  effort  to  possess  the  prize. 
Discipleship  costs  much.  Here,  too,  salvation  is  bought  by  those  who 
attain  it,  and  is  not  a  gift.  Catholic  theologians  find  here  a  simihtude 
of  the  monkish  fife  with  its  three  vows  of  renunciation,  viz.,  property, 
family,  and  will.  Everything  should  be  offered  up  gladly  for  the 
Kingdom.  It  is  spoken  of  as  if  it  were  a  possible  private  possession, 
and  so  perhaps  it  means  the  Kingdom  within  rather  than  that  without. 
Something  priceless  becomes  my  very  own  property.  I  am  not  a 
collector,  but  am  impelled  to  own  one  only  thing  of  transcendent 
worth. 

H.  Unser,^  describing  the  parable  of  the  pearl,  tells  us  that  in  the 
liturgy  of  the  early  Church  Christ  was  made  the  "pearl  born  of  Maria." 
The  ancient  folk-soul  conceived  the  pearl  as  born  of  lightning  striking 
the  sea,  and  it  was  thus  always  conceived  in  a  mussel  shell.  It  is 
thus  a  precious  stone  made  out  of  flesh,  and  was  thought  to  symbolize 
God  born  of  the  body  of  his  mother  and  not,  like  others,  a  product  of 
carnal  intercourse.    As  the  bivalve  opens  to  let  in  the  "moon  dew," 


>"  Vortifige  und  Aufsetze."    1907,  p.  ai0  f. 


582  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

as  other  folklore  has  it,  the  pearl  is  born,  and  the  Hghtning  only  loosens 
it  from  its  attachment  to  the  shell  when  it  is  ripe.  This  is  a  wide- 
spread Syrian  myth,  going  back  to  the  time  of  Jesus.  Thus,  too, 
Aphrodite  was  born  with  the  sea  for  her  father,  and  rose  to  the  surface 
in  a  shell,  as  she  is  so  often  represented  in  art.  She  was  known  as 
goddess  both  of  the  sea  and  of  pearls.  The  pearl  was  Aphrodite's 
Doppelgdnger,  and  there  are  many  symboUc  relations  that  have  evolved 
and  that  Unser  traces  to  sea-foam  and  amber.  This  conception  of 
Christ  was  motivated  by  anti-Docetism.  This  putative  origin  of  the 
pearl  made  it  a  symbol  of  the  annunciation  and  the  virgin  birth  of 
Jesus.  So,  too,  the  spark  of  the  Holy  Ghost  in  the  pure  water  of 
baptism  generated  the  new  man  in  Christ. 

C.   ILLUSTRATIVE  NARRATIVES 

50.  A  lawyer  (Luke  x:  25-37)  asked,  tempting  Jesus,  what  he 
should  do  to  inherit  life  eternal,  to  which  Jesus  replied  by  the  counter- 
question  as  to  how  he  read  the  law.  He  replied  that  he  found  in  it 
the  behest  to  love  the  Lord  with  all  the  heart,  strength,  mind,  and 
to  love  thy  neighbour  as  thyself.  To  which  Jesus  retorted.  Do  this 
and  thou  shalt  live.  But,  inquired  the  lawyer,  who  is  my  neighbour? 
To  this  Jesus  replied  by  a  parable.  A  man  going  from  Jerusalem  to 
Jericho  fell  among  thieves,  who  stripped  and  wounded  him,  and  left 
him  half  dead.  Soon  a  priest  chanced  to  come  by  and,  when  he  saw, 
passed  by  on  the  other  side.  A  Levite  did  the  same.  Then  came  a 
Samaritan  who,  when  he  saw  him,  had  compassion,  bound  his  wounds, 
poured  oil  and  wine  in  them,  set  him  on  his  beast,  brought  him  to  an 
inn,  cared  for  him  overnight,  and  on  leaving  in  the  morning  gave  the 
host  two  pennies  to  care  for  him,  promising  to  pay  when  he  came  again 
whatever  more  was  spent.  Which  of  these,  asked  Jesus,  was  the  true 
neighbour?  The  lawyer  answered.  He  who  showed  mercy.  Then, 
said  Jesus,  Go  thou  and  do  likewise. 

This  illustrative  narrative  ends  without  telling  us  whether  the 
victim  of  the  assault  recovered,  or  whether  the  Samaritan  performed 
his  pledge  to  return  and  pay,  but  the  point  is  made.  Love  God  and 
thy  neighbour,  and  thou  hast  life  eternal.  To  this  Jewish  theologian 
"neighbour"  is  made  a  distinguished  title,  and  the  Samaritan,  though 
a  heretic  and  half  heathen,  is  commended,  with  impUed  disparagement 
of  the  priest  and  the  Levite.  If  it  were,  as  some  think,  a  true  incident, 
who  would  or  could  have  told  it?  Surely  not  the  half-dead  victim. 
Neighbours  thus  extend  beyond  racial  or  creedal  circles.    Although,  as 


THE  PARABLES  OF  JESUS  583 

Jiilicher  thinks,  Luke's  setting  was  wrong,  the  meaning  is  clear.  The 
self-sacrificing  expression  of  love  has  in  the  sight  of  God  and  man 
supreme  value,  transcending  all  claims  of  birth  and  office.  Pity  more 
deserves  salvation  than  all  the  merits  of  high  officials  who  are  selfish. 
Money,  time,  and  effort  were  lavished  upon  the  stranger  by  the  ahen. 
Harms  finds  in  this  parable  only  common  kindness  and  no  specifically 
Christian  meaning,  while  others  say  Christ  is  himself  the  Samaritan, 
the  victim  is  man  as  the  assaults  of  sin  have  left  him,  and  the  kindness 
extended  to  him  symbolizes  salvation.  Some  make  Paul  the  Samari- 
tan, others  think  it  chiefly  a  satire  directed  against  the  Jewish  hierarchy. 
Few  parables  have  been  so  completely  incorporated  into  the  Christian 
consciousness,  or  are  more  beloved.  It  exemplifies  one  of  the  best 
traits  of  human  nature,  viz.,  the  sympathy  wdth  suffering  that  makes 
the  whole  world  kin,  or  the  "feehng  of  kind"  that  motivates  human 
soHdarity,  or  the  fraternity  of  truly  gregarious  man.  It  is  the  instinct 
that  has  built  hospitals,  established  free  chnics,  out-patient  wards, 
nursing  agencies  of  all  kinds,  the  Red  Cross  work,  rehef  for  \dctims  of 
plague,  famine,  floods,  fires,  and  earthquakes,  and  as  I  write,  aid  for 
the  suffering  Belgians.  The  very  name  "Good  Samaritan"  has  not 
only  redeemed  this  discredited  race,  but  connotes  all  shades  and 
varieties  of  acts  of  kindness  to  the  unfortunate.  Theologians  and 
poets  tell  us  that  this  was  the  very  motive  that  drew  Jesus  from  heaven 
to  earth.  All  in  need  are  neighbours,  and  should  be  cared  for  as  we 
would  wish  to  be  cared  for  in  their  place.  Make  such  service  a  part 
of  self-love  as  against  the  vicious  precept  and  practice  of  ruthless  self- 
maximization.  It  means  mutuahty  and  social  service,  so  that  the 
roots  of  this  apologue  go  deep  down  into  the  animal  world,  as  many 
records,  all  the  way  from  Espinas  to  Sutherland,  have  shown.  Even 
to  keep  those  socially  unfit  alive  helps  to  bring  out  the  highest  qualities 
of  human  nature,  and  without  dependents  and  defectives  normal  man 
would  have  been  far  lower  down  than  he  is  in  the  scale  of  altruism. 


51.  Apropos  of  those  who  boasted  that  they  were  righteous  and 
despised  others,  Jesus  tells  (Luke  xviii:  9-14)  the  apologue  of  two  men 
who  went  to  pray  in  the  temple.  The  Pharisee  stood  and  thanked  God 
that  he  was  not  like  other  men,  extortionate,  unjust,  adulterous,  or 
even  as  this  pubhcan.  He  fasted  twice  a  week  and  gave  tithes  of  all  he 
possessed.  But  the  pubhcan  stood  afar  and  would  not  even  lift  his 
eyes  to  heaven,  but  smote  his  breast  and  cried,  "  God,  be  merciful  to 
me,  a  sinner."  He  and  not  the  Pharisee  went  home  justified,  for  whoso 
exalteth  himself  shall  be  brought  low  and  he  that  humbleth  himself 
shall  be  exalted. 


584  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

By  confession  of  sin,  and  not  vaunting  our  self-righteousness, 
should  we  approach  God.  The  prayer  state  of  mind  is  not  that  of  self- 
laudation,  but  a  cry  of  mercy  from  moral  humility,  and  not  with  pride. 
This  state  is  the  beginning  of  hoHness,  as  the  Socratic  conviction  of 
ignorance  is  of  wisdom.  In  both  cases  discontent  with  self  augurs 
growth,  as  complacency  does  arrest.  A  conviction  of  sin  and  demerit 
is  one  of  the  striking  traits  of  Christianity,  and  exists  in  no  such  degree 
in  any  other  rehgion.  Few  things  Jesus  said  probably  so  shocked  the 
complacency  of  his  Jewish  contemporaries  as  that  these  hated  agents 
of  a  rapacious  and  extortionate  conqueror,  of  whose  depravity  the  Jews 
had  the  liveliest  sense,  should  by  the  mere  inarticulate  expression  of 
his  unworthiness  be  justified  of  God  before  the  representatives  of  their 
own  orthodoxy.  The  pubHcan's  prayer  meant  self-abandonment  to 
divine  mercy,  and  just  this  extremity  makes  the  Christian  God's  op- 
portunity. No  such  self-abasement  is  involved  in  any  phrase  of  the 
model  prayer  of  our  Lord.  But  in  the  self-conviction  of  our  own  right- 
eousness the  psychology  of  conversion  has  already  seen  the  crucial 
moment  when  the  soul  becomes  filled  and  suffused  with  a  righteousness 
not  its  own.  The  old  consciousness  is  sloughed  off,  and  a  new  and 
better  one  emerges  from  within.  Our  dead  self  is  a  stepping-stone  to 
our  higher  Hfe.  Indeed,  self-consciousness  itself  is  at  bottom  a  witness 
to  and  a  measure  of  the  degree  of  man's  departure  from  the  true  norm 
of  his  nature.  This  acknowledgment  of  aberrancy  and  aberration  is  the 
culmination.  The  fruit  of  the  tree  of  knowledge  reveals  good  and  evil, 
and  the  only  function  of  true  wisdom  is  to  bring  sin  to  light,  shed  it, 
and  leave  us  better.  There  is  no  true  knowledge  that  is  ethically 
indifferent.  This  is  the  psychic  quarry  where  Paul  wrought  best  and 
deepest,  and  few  of  Jesus'  precepts  suggest  so  much  beyond  and  above 
the  range  of  our  present  knowledge  of  the  soul.  If  in  some  respects  we 
seem  abreast  of  Jesus  in  our  insights,  here  in  the  psychology  of  sin  we 
have  a  vast  deal  yet  to  learn,  and  the  best  of  us  can  only  dimly  feel 
that  in  this  direction  Jesus  far  transcends  our  ken. 


52.  A  man  (Luke  xii:i3-2i)  asked  Jesus  to  tell  his  brother  to  divide 
his  inheritance  with  him,  but  Jesus  refused,  saying.  Who  made  me  a 
judge  and  divider  for  you?  Beware  of  covetousness,  for  a  man's  life 
does  not  consist  in  an  abundance  of  the  things  he  hath.  A  rich  man's 
ground  yielded  bountifully  and  he  thought.  What  shall  I  do  to  provide 
room  to  store  my  harvests?  I  will  tear  down  my  barns  and  build 
greater,  and  when  these  are  full  I  will  say  to  my  soul,  Soul,  you  have 
much  goods  laid  up  for  many  years.  Eat,  drink  and  be  merry.  But 
God  said  to  him.  Thou  fool,  this  night  thy  soul  shall  be  required  of  thee, 


THE  PARABLES  OF  JESUS  585 

and  then  whose  shall  these  goods  be?    Such  a  man  lays  up  treasure 
for  himself,  and  is  not  rich  toward  God. 


The  fate  of  the  foolish  rich  is  here  set  forth.  His  folly  consists  in 
planning  selfish  enjoyment  when  death  is  unwittingly  at  hand.  In  his 
castle-building  revery  he  forgets  the  need  of  God's  constant  grace. 
In  planning  to  secure  and  enlarge  his  possessions  for  his  personal  en- 
joyment he  forgets  the  Lord  of  life  and  death.  This  warning  against 
greed  is  not  specifically  Christian.  This  large  owner  had  no  thought  of 
others,  for  he  was  a  hard-hearted  egoist  and  thought  not  of  laying  up 
treasure  in  heaven.  The  gem  of  this  otherwise  aesthetically  homely 
parable  is  the  soliloquy.  In  fact  there  is  nothing  to  indicate  that  rich 
men  just  planning  to  secure  their  future  enjoyment  are  prone  to  die; 
and  yet  retiring  from  active  affairs  to  a  life  of  idle  self-indulgence  is 
always  hygienically  a  very  critical  step.  To  say,  "I  will  henceforth 
impupate  myself  and  live  for  personal  pleasure,"  is  moral  death.  Per- 
haps all  who  do  this  deliberately  ought,  in  the  interests  of  the  general 
social  well-being,  to  die  at  that  point,  for  mere  luxury  makes  men  para- 
sites. A  sybarite  is  a  drone  in  the  social  hive,  and  in  the  social 
economic  order  is  ripe  for  death.  Such  a  resolution  is  unintentional 
suicide.  Otherwise  God  might  have  demanded  not  his  soul  but  his 
property  that  night.  In  the  sense  of  this  parable  all  who  hoard  for 
selfish  enjoyment  are  fools  compassing  their  own  destruction,  for  true 
life  is  love  and  service  to  others. 


53.  There  was  a  rich  man,  Dives  (Luke  xvi:  19-31),  clothed  in 
purple  and  fine  hnen  and  faring  sumptuously,  and  there  was  a  beggar, 
Lazarus,  full  of  sores,  which  a  dog  licked  as  he  lay  at  the  gate,  desiring 
only  the  crumbs  that  fell  from  the  rich  man's  table.  Both  died,  and  the 
plutocrat  in  hell  saw  Lazarus  in  heaven,  cried  for  mercy,  and  implored 
Father  Abraham  for  a  drop  of  water  on  his  finger-tip  to  cool  his 
parched  tongue,  for  he  was  tormented  in  the  flames.  But  the  patriarch 
replied.  You  had  in  your  life  good  things  and  Lazarus  evil,  and  now  a 
great  gulf  which  no  man  can  cross  is  fixed  between  us.  Then,  at  least, 
said  Dives,  Send  some  one  to  warn  my  five  brethren  lest  they  come  to 
this  place  of  torment.  No,  replied  Abraham.  They  have  Moses  and 
the  prophets  and  should  hear  them.  But,  said  Dives,  If  one  goes  to 
them  from  the  dead  they  will  surely  repent.  Not  so,  said  Abraham. 
If  they  hear  not  Moses  and  the  prophets  they  would  not  be  persuaded 
by  one  from  the  dead. 


586  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

The  awful  imagery  of  this  parable  is  branded  on  the  very  soul  of 
Christendom.  This  world  will  be  turned  topsyturvy  in  the  next,  its 
pleasure  will  become  agony,  and  its  glory  shame.  The  lowest  shall  be 
supremely  exalted,  and  the  last  become  first.  Rewards  of  this  earth 
bring  penalty  in  the  next,  and  the  very  lowest  is  there  supreme.  All  is 
fatally  fixed  beyond  all  hope  of  further  change.  There  is  no  intimation 
that  Dives  had  any  guilt  save  that  of  being  rich,  or  that  Lazarus  had 
any  merit  save  poverty,  unless  Dives  ought  to  have  known  and  relieved 
the  suffering  of  Lazarus;  but  the  next  world  is  represented  as  simply  one 
of  complemental  reversal.  Wealth  here  is  repaid  with  hell  there,  and 
pauperism  with  heaven.  There  is  not  the  slightest  mitigation,  and 
all  probation  has  passed.  Literature  abounds  in  descriptions  of  an 
au  rebours  world  where  plebeians  become  princes,  kitchen  drudges  have 
all  the  wealth  of  fairyland,  diamonds  are  stones  and  stones  diamonds. 
But  these  are  usually  thought  mere  dreams  or  fancies.  Nietzsche 
describes  not  only  a  transvaluation  but  a  retrovaluation  of  worths, 
and  Plato  sketched  a  counter-world  where  all  laws  are  reversed  and 
time  goes  backward,  or  where  men  worship  what  they  have  burned 
and  burn  what  they  erstwhile  worshipped,  where  truth  becomes  a  lie 
and  a  lie  truth,  the  hated  are  loved  and  the  loved  hated,  the  devil  is 
God's  ape,  the  witches'  sabbath  parodies  the  sacram.ents,  and  hell  is  a 
reflex  of  heaven.  Contrasts  and  antitheses  are  tonics  and  stimulants. 
Here  all  this  counterparting  or  dualism  in  both  philosophy  and  the 
imagination  is  focussed  down  to  a  single  scene  setting  this  world  over 
against  the  next.  No  one  can  doubt  that  the  general  view  here  illus- 
trated has  had  the  greatest  social  efficacy,  and  has  not  only  made  the 
hardest  lots  tolerable,  but  has  provoked  asceticism  and  every  form  of 
self-stupration.  Hardship  and  pain  have  been  wooed  as  muses,  that 
by  paralleling  the  state  of  Lazarus  his  fortune  also  might  be  ensured. 
Misery  otherwise  utterly  unendurable  has  been  borne,  and  instead  of 
arousing  reactions  that  nothing  could  resist  has  found  vent  in  visions  of 
compensating  joy  and  glory.  Crafty  oppressors,  temporal  and  spirit- 
ual, have  used  this  reciprocity  formula  to  cajole  their  victims.  When  a 
future  of  compensation  has  been  doubted,  and  men  have  even  begun  to 
think  this  life  perhaps  the  be-all  and  death  the  end-all,  society  has 
undergone  its  most  radical  revolution  as  a  result,  and  priests  and  piety 
have  fared  hardest  of  all  because  felt  to  be  arch-deluders.  If  death 
were  the  close,  or  the  next  world  only  a  prolongation  of  this  under 
similar  circumstances  or  something  yet  more  pallid  like  that  of  the 
Homeric  shades,  how  different  would  have  been  the  history  of  Chris- 
tianity, how  weakened  the  sense  that  justice  rules  the  universe !  With- 
out heaven  and  hell  the  morality  of  all  those  ages  when  the  chief  motive 
of  virtue  was  to  escape  punishment  would  have  suffered,  though  per- 
haps such  rewards  and  punishments  have  made  men  purblind  to  the 


THE  PARABLES  OF  JESUS  587 

inner  oracle  and  to  the  old  Stoic  ethics  that  virtue  is  its  own  reward 
and  should  be  followed  if  it  lead  to  the  inferno.  We  should  have  had 
no  Dante  or  Milton.  Jesus  far  more  than  any  other  developed  and 
gave  the  world  a  moral  heaven  and  hell.  He  made  them  definite,  real, 
longer,  more  durable,  and  more  important  than  anything  mundane, 
and  if  he  had  done  nothing  else  than  organize  all  the  fragmentary 
superstitions  of  a  Hfe  beyond  the  grave  so  as  to  utilize  their  combined 
power  most  effectively  for  good,  what  incalculable  service  to  the  race 
so  long  as  and  wherever  this  superstition  exists !  This  sublime  frescoing 
of  the  hereafter  had  most  to  do  with  bringing  the  barbarians  into  the 
Church.  By  itself  alone  it  is  perhaps  the  most  stupendous  work  ever 
achieved  by  an  ethico-religious  genius.  It  has  quickened  sluggish 
consciences  that  nothing  else  could  touch.  No  one  who  knows  the 
human  heart  can  have  patience  with  those  who,  because  there  are  a 
few  pure  and  lofty  souls  that  can  live  out  the  best  within  them  without 
the  aid  of  hope  or  fear  for  the  future,  argue  that  more  harm  than  good 
was  done  by  using  these  immense  powers  to  stimulate  righteousness 
and  repress  evil.  Even  a  fear  of  fire  scorching  and  crackling  the  flesh 
is  needed  for  moral  degenerates  and  perverts,  and  in  all  men  the  power 
of  the  boundless  future  and  the  long-ranged  view  of  Hfe,  the  standpoint 
of  the  hereafter,  are  all  the  better  developed  for  this  drastic  pedagogy 
and  all  the  traditions  and  theosophemes  that  are  grouped  about  it. 
With  all  our  boasted  science  the  best  of  us  are  still  more  or  less  in  the 
nursery-tale  stage  as  to  ethical  values,  and  if  these  were  only  the  black 
man  and  the  gobhns  of  childhood  both  their  deterrent  and  stimulating 
influences  would  be  in  the  right  direction.  What  the  world  most  needs 
is  a  fixed  and  indissoluble  association  in  our  very  neurons  between 
sin  and  shuddering  horror,  so  that  the  nerv^es  shall  tingle  and  crepitate 
when  we  do  or  contemplate  wrong.  This  is  to  fear  aright.  It  is  to 
have  the  strongest  of  all  human  impulsions,  the  dread  of  pain  and  dis- 
ease, directed  toward  its  chief  cause.  For  the  ethical  psychologist  the 
place  or  state  of  future  weal  or  woe  based  on  rewards  and  penalties  is 
not  a  question  of  objective  reaUty  but  of  subjective  need,  and  because 
he  cannot  doubt  the  latter  he  holds  with  regard  to  these  behefs  a  Kan- 
tian view  that  they  do  truly  exist,  since  the  practical  reason  is  higher 
than  the  theoretical.  If  the  latter  doubts,  the  former,  which  is  a 
higher  tribunal,  affirms,  their  unassailable  reality  for  the  will,  and  in 
this  form  they  should  be  preached  from  the  pulpit  in  new  and  stronger 
terms.^ 

Of  these  fifty-three  parables,  three  seem  marked  by  ignorance  or 
error,  vi^.,  (7)  what  enters  the  body  does  not  defile;  (11)  the  eye  filling 

»See  also  C.  G.  Griffenhoofe:  "The  Unwritten  Sayings  of  Christ."  Cambridge .  1903,  liS  p.;  and  especially  L.  E. 
Browne:  "The  Parables  of  the  Gospels  in  the  Light  of  Modem  Criticism."  Cambridge,  1913,  p.  91. 


588  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

the  body  with  light;  (48)  the  mustard  seed  becoming  the  greatest  of 
trees;  but  still  the  meaning  is  clear  and  the  moral  remains  unaffected. 
Some  are  obvious,  if  not  almost  commonplace,  admonitions  of  ordinary 
worldly  wisdom;  like  (6)  the  bUnd  cannot  lead  the  blind;  (14)  a  tree 
is  known  by  its  fruit;  (24)  counting  the  cost  before  building;  (26)  agree- 
ing with  an  enemy  betimes;  (27)  taking  the  lowest  place.  Dearest  of 
all  adown  the  centuries  are  perhaps  (35)  the  prodigal;  (50)  the  good 
Samaritan.  The  danger  of  being  too  late  is  especially  stressed  in  (40) 
the  ten  virgins,  in  (53)  the  rich  man  and  Lazarus,  and  in  several  others. 
The  efficacy  of  importunity  stands  out  in  (30)  the  friendly  neighbour 
roused  from  bed;  (31)  the  woman  and  the  unjust  judge.  The  largest 
number,  however,  are  based  on  or  connected  with  the  rights  and  duties  of 
tenants  and  landlord,  e.  g.,  (2)  duty  of  unthanked  servants;  (13)  serving 
two  masters;  (18)  the  loyal  and  the  disloyal  tenant;  (19)  sitting 
up  late  for  the  master  of  the  house;  (32)  the  usurer  and  the  two 
debtors;  (33)  the  pitiless  servant;  (37)  the  defiant  tenant;  (43)  the 
unjust  householder;  while  still  others  refer  more  or  less  to  this  re- 
lation. 

This  group  of  parables  suggests  from  its  closely  related  themes  that 
Jesus'  ideal  in  youth  and  in  early  manhood  may  have  been  that  of 
being  the  lord  of  a  manor;  perhaps  inviting  guests  to  a  feast;  loaning 
out  talents  according  to  ability,  with  a  definite  theory  concerning  pay 
and  the  eleventh-hour  labourers;  abhorring  usurers;  counting  the  cost 
beforehand;  demanding  an  undivided  and  also  an  absolute  service; 
wise  enough  to  build  on  a  rock,  and  not  on  the  sand ;  shrewd  enough  to  be 
reticent  in  purchasing  a  treasure  found  in  a  field;  interested  in  tares  and 
wheat;  an  owner  of  sheep;  pleasingly  conscious  that  seed  once  sown 
grew  while  he  slept;  also  with  knowledge  of  the  different  kinds  of 
ground;  pleased  when  the  fig-tree  budded  as  a  herald  of  spring,  and 
condemnatory  if  it  was  barren;  piqued  if  his  dinner  invitations  were 
refused;  issuing  orders  to  brothers,  one  of  whom  obeyed  and  one  of 
whom  did  not;  welcoming  a  vagabond  son  back;  yielding  like  Aris- 
totle's magnanimous  man  to  wise  importunity;  heahng  up  quarrels 
quickly  before  lawyers  and  courts  magnified  them;  using  precautions 
against  thieves;  loaning  money  wisely;  leading  a  life  open  as  day,  and 
with  nothing  in  it  to  conceal,  etc. 

On  this  view  the  parables,  which  are  so  authentic  and  reveal  to 
us  so  much  of  the  soul  of  Jesus,  suggest  that  his  youthful  dream  was 


THE  PARABLES  OF  JESUS  589 

to  command  servants,  stewards,  tenants;  to  be  a  master  thrifty  yet 
kind,  wise  in  building,  just  yet  sympathetic — in  short,  a  noble  country 
gentleman,  a  position  Bismarck  later  called  the  finest  on  earth  for  the 
development  of  all-sided  qualities  of  manhood,  and  the  fullest  of  op- 
portunity for  the  highest  culture,  the  choicest  virtues,  and  the  greatest 
usefulness.  Something  like  this  was  very  likely  the  role  Jesus  came  to 
fill  in  his  own  youthful  reveries,  and  he  lived  sympathetically  into  this 
adolescent  imagination  far  more  fully  than  into  any  other.  On  this 
view,  in  the  parables  we  see  how  he  had  idealized  the  opportunities  and 
duties  of  some  such  position  in  Hfe.  This  is  borne  out  not  only  by  the 
theme  but  by  the  lesson  and  meaning  of  the  parables.  Now  as  the 
"visions  splendid"  by  which  the  youth  had  been  attended  were  de- 
layed in  their  realization  and  finally  recognized  as  impossible  of  at- 
tainment, two  diametrically  opposite  tendencies  gradually  supervened 
in  Jesus'  soul  as  a  natural  and  inevitable  consequence  of  his  unconquer- 
able and  aggressive  spirit.  On  the  one  hand  he  came  to  hate  the  rich 
who  could  have  realized  such  ideals  but  whose  interests  had  grown  sor- 
did; who  failed  even  to  see  these  opportunities,  and  who  seemed  to  him 
both  culpable  and  despicable  because  instead  of  making  the  very  best, 
they  made  the  worst  use  of  their  means.  On  the  other  hand,  he  came 
to  aggrandize  his  dreams  of  living  as  a  great  country  lord  into  being 
the  head  of  a  far  greater  Kingdom  extending  over  all  Israel,  in  which 
ideal  conditions  should  prevail — a  conception  which  the  events  of  his 
life  caused  him  to  vastate  and  to  sublimate  until  it  began  to  take  the 
features  of  a  terrestrial  if  not  a  cosmic  and  heavenly  Kingdom,  partly 
realized  on  earth  under  his  leadership.  Thus,  in  a  word,  we  find  in  the 
parables  a  psychoanalytic  key  to  the  secret  of  the  evolution  of  Jesus' 
idea  of  the  Kingdom,  which  was  later  developed  as  the  Church  visible 
and  invisible.  All  this  the  world  would  have  lost  had  he  achieved  in 
fact  the  day-dream  of  his  youth.  This  processional  of  genius,  doubtless 
more  or  less  unrealized  by  him,  he  has  unconsciously  revealed  in  the 
parables,  the  theme  of  which  thus  constitutes  an  unwitting  confession 
on  his  part  as  well  as  a  series  of  admonitions.  As  prophets  found  their 
inspiration  in  days  of  calamity  for  which  they  over-compensated  by 
portraying  the  glories  of  the  future  Zion,  so  the  thwarted  and  repressed 
ambitions  of  Jesus'  youth  and  manhood  surged  back  and  up  into  the 
inward  realization  of  a  new  theocracy,  and  even  a  new  paradise,  in 
which  his  reign  would  be  as  benign  as  it  was  sovereign,  and  where 


590  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

justice  and  mercy  would  be  supreme.    To  this  Kingdom  nearly  all  the 
parables  directly  or  indirectly  relate. 

It  was  a  kingdom  and  not  a  democracy  that  Jesus  would  found, 
and  most  modern  Christian  socialists  of  the  Rauschenbusch  type 
seem  quite  to  forget  this.  The  political,  industrial,  social,  and  eccle- 
siastical institutions,  as  Jesus  conceived  them,  were  hierarchies  strat- 
ified into  ranks  or  classes  from  the  prophet,  priest,  or  king,  down  to  the 
meanest  and  most  menial  servant  whose  sole  obligation  it  is  to  obey 
and  who  has  no  claim  even  for  thanks.  Men  could  take,  or  were 
assigned,  places  high  or  low.  Jesus  never  entirely  outgrew  the  patri- 
archal idea.  The  head  of  his  Kingdom  was  no  constitutional  monarch, 
but  more  like  Plato's  wise  and  good  tyrant,  or  a  father  to  all  his  sub- 
jects. All  its  citizens  must  love  and  serve  one  another,  and  be  more 
than  just,  that  is,  merciful,  to  one  another.  Democracy  existed  before 
Christianity,  and  so  did  socialism  and  even  communism.  The  King- 
dom of  the  parables  is  no  republic,  though  the  fraternal  bond  of  sym- 
pathy must  exist  not  only  between  equals  of  the  same  station  or  caste 
but  between  all,  high  and  low  alike.  If  Christianity  made  each  in- 
dividual of  transcendent  value  there  remains,  nevertheless,  an  uncal- 
culated  difference  between  the  value  of  individuals  even  where  degrees 
of  merit  are  the  same.  Of  course,  if  it  is  hard  to  harmonize  the  three 
synoptic  Gospels,  it  is  indefinitely  harder  to  harmonize  the  teachings 
of  the  fifty-three  parables.  But  their  general  drift  and  trend  is  un- 
mistakable. If  in  some  the  Kingdom  comes  like  a  convulsion  sweeping 
all  away,  in  others  it  comes  as  gradually  and  naturally  as  the  seed  ger- 
minates. To  some  institutions  it  is  like  dynamite;  to  others  it  comes 
as  rain  or  fertilizer.  So,  in  our  infinitely  more  complex  civilization 
there  are  charitable,  philanthropic,  reform,  and  other  efi"orts  better 
and  vaster,  and  there  are  also  worse  tendencies  and  institutions,  than 
it  ever  entered  into  the  heart  of  Jesus  to  conceive;  but  here  and  now,  as 
there  and  then,  there  are,  and  should  be,  both  catastrophes  and  benign 
evolution.  There  are  still  rank  tares  fit  only  for  fire,  growing  with  the 
wheat,  ignorance,  and  superstition  along  with  science  and  true  culture, 
animaUty  beside  spontaneous  spirituality.  But  although  the  perfect 
Kingdom  as  Jesus  conceived  it  is  still  far  from  realized,  there  has  been 
progress  toward  it  since  his  day,  and  therefore  the  objurgations  and 
condign  sentences  he  pronounced  upon  the  state  of  things  he  knew,  it 
is  only  fanaticism  or  pessimism  to  apply  without  qualification  to  our 


THE  PARABLES  OF  JESUS  591 

civilization  to-day.  Thus  Jesus'  youthful  reveries  of  an  ideal  manor 
and  its  feudal  lordship  and  its  manifold  orders  of  service,  vast  as  it 
came  to  be  in  his  mind  as  the  months  and  years  of  his  Ufe  went  by,  and 
far  vaster  yet  as  the  conception  of  it  has  since  become,  have  all  attained 
reality  enough  to  give  the  world  its  most  precious  hope  as  it  continues 
to  grow  from  age  to  age,  although  perhaps  aeons  yet  must  pass  before 
it  fills  the  earth. 


CHAPTER  TEN 

THE   MIRACLES 

The  higher  criticism  and  miracles — Why  Jesus  became  a  miracle 
worker — (A)  The  healing  miracles — Their  technique  and  conditions — 
Their  results — The  first  healing — Blindness  and  its  symbolism — ^Deaf 
mutes — The  lame — The  withered  hand — Dropsy — The  epUeptic  at 
the  synagogue — The  pool  of  Bethesda — Possession — The  demoniac 
in  Gadara — Allegorization — Leprosy — j^.lalchus's  ear — (B)  Resurrec- 
tions— (a)  Jairus's  daughter  and  the  youth  of  Nain  as  adolescent — 
(b)  Lazarus — (c)  Jesus'  own  resurrection — (C)  Cures  at  a  distance — 
(D)  Nature  miracles — (a)  Cana  and  the  symbolism  of  water  made 
wine — (b)  The  miraculous  draught  of  fishes — (c)  The  feeding — (d) 
Stilling  the  tempest — The  psychology  and  pedagogy  of  the  miracles 
from  the  standpoint  of  geneticism — The  laminated  soul — The  miracles 
as  sarcophagi. 

AS  TO  the  doctmientary  evidence  of  miracles,  the  oldest  Christian 
A-%  writings  are  the  only  undisputed  epistles  of  the  chief  missionary, 
"^  Paul,  to  the  churches  he  founded  at  Corinth  and  Galilee  and  to 
the  Petrine  Church  at  Rome.  These  four  seem  to  have  been  written  from 
twenty-one  to  twenty-seven  years  after  Jesus'  death.  Second  comes 
Mark,  thirty-five  to  forty  years  after  the  Crucifixion,  which  was 
compiled  from  earlier,  chiefly  Petrine,  traditions.  Third,  and  at 
about  the  same  date,  come  the  logia,  lost  but  partially  reconstructed, 
and  containing  chiefly  Jesus'  sayings.  Fourth  comes  Matthew,  70  to 
100  A.  D.,  based  on  Mark  and  on  the  logia,  but  adding  some  new  ma- 
terial. Fifth  come  two  treatises  written  between  70  and  75  A.  d.,  by  a 
Greek  disciple  of  Paul.  The  first  is  the  Gospel  of  Luke,  which  sets  out 
to  be  more  complete,  exhaustive,  and  scientific  than  those  that  had  pre- 
ceded, and  the  other  is  Acts,  containing  events  from  the  narrow  curcle 
as  Jesus  left  it  up  to  the  climax  in  the  establishment  of  the  Church  at 
Rome,  which  utilized  at  least  one  older  source.  Sixth  came  a  "  mystical 
and  devotional  treatise  on  the  Incarnation  thrown  into  biographic 
form,"  which  we  know  as  the  Gospel  of  Saint  John,  written  probably 

592 


THE  MIRACLES  593 

soon  after  the  end  of  the  first  Christian  century,  or  some  seventy  years 
after  Jesus'  death.  All  the  Gospels  were  thus  derived  and  edited 
compilations  written  from  an  older  source  (which  can  be  traced  back  to 
probably  from  twenty-one  to  thirty- two  years  after  Jesus'  death), 
while  our  first  three  Gospels  took  form  fifteen  or  eighteen  years  later, 
except  John,  which  came  about  a  quarter  of  a  century  later  still. 

As  to  the  oldest  source,  Paul  does  not  even  allude  to  any  miracles 
done  by  Jesus.  The  then-unwritten  Gospel,  as  he  knew  it,  consisted 
almost  entirely  of  the  story  of  the  Passion  and  Resurrection  of  Jesus. 
He  knew  Httle  else  concerning  Jesus'  Hfe  or  teaching,  nearly  all  of 
which  was  developed  later.  His  detachment  from  this  source  was  due 
to  his  absorption  in  the  events  of  the  last  week  of  Jesus'  career.  The 
Gospels,  giving  Jesus'  previous  Hfe,  were  from  his  point  of  view  an 
afterthought.  The  supernatural  elements  Paul  believed  in  were  the 
gifts  of  the  Holy  Spirit,  wisdom,  knowledge,  faith,  heahng,  prophecy, 
and  tongues,  more  or  less  correlated  with  the  ecclesiastical  offices. 
Thus  the  authority  that  goes  back  nearest  to  Jesus'  own  day  contains 
nothing  more  miraculous  than  faith  heahng,  exorcism,  etc. 

As  to  Mark,  while  it  gives  more  growth  and  unity,  the  chronology 
and  selection  of  incidents  are  both  somewhat  perverse.  The  Church 
preceded  the  Gospels,  and  hence  even  Mark  is  more  apologetic  and 
theological  than  historic.  Before  he  wrote,  the  word  "gospel"  meant 
a  message  to  faith.  Mark  consists  largely  of  Petrine  traditions.  Its 
author  was  probably  John  Mark,  who  came  into  contact  with  Jesus 
only  during  Passion  Week,  and  whose  house  was  afterward  a  meeting- 
place  for  the  disciples.  He  also  accompanied  Paul  on  his  first  mission- 
ary tour,  and  he  very  likely  came  under  Peter's  influence  later.  Under 
the  latter's  influence  he  extended  the  life  of  Jesus  backward  beyond 
Paul's  ken,  and  most  of  these  additions  could  have  been  and  probably 
were  supplied  by  Peter.  Thus  we  have  in  Mark  two  parts,  first  the 
events  of  the  last  week,  which  John  Mark  very  probably  saw  at  first 
hand  and  from  which  Paul  started,  and  secondly  the  rival  Petrine 
reminiscences  of  the  previous  career  of  Jesus.  The  miracle  stories 
belong  to  the  latter,  and  centre  about  Jesus'  early  period  in  Galilee, 
which  is  more  obscure. 

While  some  still  dispute  the  existence  of  the  above  lost  source, 
called  "Q'*  (Quelle)  or  the  logia,  the  Oxford  students  have  sanctioned 
it,  and  Harnack  has  even  attempted  to  reconstruct  it  in  a  document  of 


594  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

nearly  two  hundred  verses,  chiefly  made  up  of  Jesus'  teachings.  Be- 
sides these  it  contains  only  six  incidents  of  which  two  are  miracles, 
viz.,  the  healing  of  the  centurion's  servant  and  the  casting  out  of  the 
dumb  devil.  Thus  it  is  about  as  free  from  miracles  as  is  the  latter 
part  of  Mark;  and  both  the  above  miracles  are  those  of  healing  al- 
though one  seems  to  be  by  a  most  mysterious  action  at  a  distance, 
which  anti-supernaturalists  think  a  coincidence  and  cite  parallels. 

Matthew  used  our  Mark  and  "Q,"  and  also  added  other  material. 
Here  detailed  criticism  shows  that  the  only  evidence  of  most  of  Mat- 
thew's miracles  is  Mark,  and  there  are  some  traces,  though  very  sUght, 
of  a  tendency  to  exaggerate  these.    What  he  adds  is  least  trustworthy. 

Luke  claims  to  have  been  written  by  an  educated  gentile  compan- 
ion of  Paul,  and  marks  a  new  stage  of  tradition.  He  assumes  a  new 
method,  for  he  was  not  an  eyewitness,  and  refers  to  the  failure  of 
other  attempts  by  those  who  did  not  know  Jesus  at  first  hand.  To  this 
physician-evangelist  Jesus  is  less  Messiah  than  saviour  and  healer  of 
the  body  and  soul,  and  thus  to  the  miraculous  tales  he  brings  no  new 
evidence  but  various  new  motives.  He  does  not  omit  any  previous 
records  on  grounds  of  incredulity  or  lack  of  evidence,  but  amplifies 
and  strongly  emphasizes  nearly  all  the  supernatural  events,  and  most 
of  those  which  he  adds  are  extremely  marvellous  and  rest  on  hearsay 
and  tradition  as  they  had  been  developing  for  about  twenty-five  years. 

John  cares  less  for  the  facts  than  for  their  meaning.  If  the 
Gospel  that  bears  his  name  was  not  written  by  him  in  his  old  age,  re- 
viving and  embellishing  old  memories,  it  was  doubtless  composed  by 
one  or  more  authors  who  reached  the  facts  through  their  faith  rather 
than  vice  versa  as  with  the  synoptists.  The  farther  we  go  back  from 
the  Passion  Week,  which  has  no  miracles,  the  more  miracles  we  find. 
In  John,  Jesus  himself  is  miraculous.  His  story  is  of  the  Incarnation 
of  a  preexistent  divine  person  who  as  God's  vicegerent  had  created 
the  world  that  he  now  visits.  He  could  supernaturally  read  the 
thoughts  of  all;  he  vanishes  or  passes  mysteriously  through  crowds; 
he  is  a  stranger  to  and  quite  aloof  from  the  Jews.  The  divinity  of  the 
Johannin  Jesus  did  not  depend  on  supernatural  birth,  and  so  this  is  not 
mentioned.  The  judgment,  too,  is  not  impending,  but  came  with  the 
advent  of  the  Paraclete.  Of  historic  crises  or  developmental  stages, 
such  as  the  baptism,  temptation,  transfiguration,  etc.,  which  are  marked 
in  the  synoptists,  there  is  no  trace;  but  Jesus  is  quite  divine  from  the 


THE  MIRACLES  595 

beginning,  and  is  thus  independent  of  time  and  space.  John's  seven 
miracles  are  saturated  with  symbolism.^ 

The  above  represents  in  the  barest  and  most  summary  outline  the 
results  of  the  higher  criticism  in  their  chief  bearings  upon  the  problem 
of  miracles.  It  is  precisely  here,  where  these  studies  end,  that  the 
problem  of  geneticism  begins,  which  is  how  and  by  what  motivation 
did  these  few  actual  cures  which  Jesus  performed  come  to  be  magnified 
into  the  prodigies  recorded  by  the  Evangelists,  why  are  they  so  clung 
to,  and  what  is  their  positive  value  and  meaning  to  us?  The  higher 
criticism  only  informs,  but  does  not  edify.  The  religious  instincts 
and  needs  can  never  be  satisfied  with  negations.  We  accept  all  the 
real  results  of  criticism,  but  charge  it  with  blindness  to  deeper  meanings. 
Thus  religious  psychology  comes  to  the  defense  of  miracles.  They 
made  the  fortune  of  Christianity  and  are  still  precious  to  beUevers. 
Despite  their  historic  falsity  they  have  a  high  significance  for  piety 
and  also  for  psychology,  for  they  are  made,  warp  and  woof,  out  of 
soul-stuff  and  are  thus  in  a  sense  both  more  vaUd  and  valuable  than  if 
they  had  been  actually  performed.  What  seemed  their  negation  thus 
really  rescues  them  to  higher  purposes,  and  from  this  standpoint  they 
are  invested  with  a  new  and  hitherto  undreamed-of  truth.  All  re- 
ligions have  miracles,  which  are  the  dearest  children  of  faith.  Even 
the  wildest  of  those  in  Brewer's  "Comprehensive  Dictionary "^  are 
psychologically  explicable  and  constitute  valuable  data  for  our  science. 
But  those  that  evolved  in  the  early  decades  of  Christianity  are  unique 
and  in  a  class  by  themselves,  because,  from  the  psychogenetic  view- 
point, false  as  they  are,  they  are  by  no  means  mere  creatures  of  imag- 
ination, nor  products  of  superstition.  They  take  us  to  the  shrine  of 
the  inner  fife  of  Jesus,  on  which  every  one  of  them  sheds  light,  and 
without  which  the  world  would  never  have  realized  much  of  the  best 
that  he  was,  did,  and  said.  Let  us,  then,  approach  our  problem  by  a 
few  general  considerations. 

It  was  a  peculiarity  of  the  Jews  that  any  great  leader  to  be  ac- 
cepted must  accredit  himself  by  working  miracles.  Thus  the  great 
men  of  old  had  done.  Thus  only,  too,  could  Jesus  ever  meet  the  popu- 
lar ideals  of  a  Messiah,  or  fit  the  specifications  of  prophecy  as  his 
biographers  had  a  veritable  passion  for  making  him  seem  to  do,  often 

>London,  looi,  s8»  p. 

This  is  well  epitomized  for  our  purposes  in  J.  M.  Tbompaon:  "The  Miracle*  of  the  New  TetUmeDt"    London, 
igii.  936  p. 


596  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

in  ver>'  trivial  details.  Not  only  the  multitude  but  the  disciples  again 
and  again  "desired  mighty  works"  as  a  sign;  but  if  they  had  not  be- 
lieved that  he  did  miracles,  it  is  very  doubtful  whether  they  would  have 
recognized  him  as  sent  from  God.  In  the  first  two  so-called  tempta- 
tions he  seems  to  have  considered  and  definitely  rejected  this  function; 
but  the  Pharisees  challenged  him  to  do  them,  the  populace  awaited 
them,  and  even  the  disciples  assumed  that  he  would  do  them.  There 
were  no  hospitals  or  asylums,  and  the  sick  were  all  about,  while  the 
troublesome  times  preceding  had  produced,  we  learn,  an  exceptional 
number  of  neurotics  and  psychotics,  so  that  every  characteristic  type 
of  mental  aberration  was  constantly  met  with.  Every  one  assumed 
that  a  religious  teacher  must  also  exercise  the  functions  of  a  healer. 
To  this  end  the  patients  and  their  friends  constantly  importuned 
Jesus,  while  his  closer  followers  were  intensely  prone  to  ascribe  the 
natural  stimulus  of  his  presence,  touch,  or  handclasp,  or  even  the  cases 
where  the  betterment  was  slight  or  temporary,  to  supernatural  healing 
power. 

This  Jesus  deprecated,  and  obviously  sought  to  avoid  the  reputa- 
tion of  being  a  mere  curer  of  the  body.  He  often  refused  to  attempt 
marvels,  sometimes  with  evident  resentment,  and  rebuked  the  spirit 
that  demanded  it.  He  told  those  who  thought  themselves  cured  to  tell 
no  man,  commanded  the  evil  spirits  that  would  proclaim  him  to  hold 
their  peace,  escaped  when  pressed  by  the  crowd  who  sought  cures,  said 
to  them  who  thought  he  had  healed  them,  with  equal  truth  and  mod- 
esty, "  Thy  faith  hath  made  thee  whole."  But  he  could  not  escape  the 
superstition  of  his  day.  He  must  either  accept  the  reputation  of  the- 
urgic  power  or  else  abandon  his  divine  mission.  This  seems  the  alter- 
native, although  we  do  not  know  how  clearly  and  sharply  it  was 
present  to  Jesus'  soul.  How  far  the  r61e  of  miracle-doer  was  forced  on 
him  by  the  pedagogic  necessity  of  his  day,  and  how  far  his  intimates 
and  biographers  misrepresented  him,  we  can  never  know.  Perhaps 
the  latter  was  true  of  the  physical  and  more  utterly  unbeUevable 
miracles,  and  the  former  of  the  more  credible  therapeutic  marvels. 
To  do  the  latter  he  was  of  course  strongly  impelled  by  sympathy  with 
suffering  and  distress,  and  he  also  very  clearly  saw  that  these  were  the 
best  s3anbols  of  just  the  spiritual  work  he  sought  to  do,  viz.,  to  open  the 
eves  of  the  spiritually  blind  and  the  ears  of  the  deaf,  make  the  lame 
walk,  and  bring  health  to  the  sick,  if  not  life  to  the  dead.    Perhaps 


THE  MIRACLES  597 

he  even  learned  to  use  some  of  the  most  fabulous  nature  marvels  as- 
cribed to  him  as  parables,  set  in  scene  object-lesson-wise,  of  higher 
truths. 

But  if  the  repute  of  a  wonder-worker  made  his  success  in  his  day 
and  through  the  earlier  centuries  of  Christianity,  now  we  have  to  see 
and  realize  that  the  rehgion  of  Jesus  is  losing  its  hold  upon  the  cul- 
tured world  precisely  because  of  the  deeds  imputed  to  him  that  made 
his  early  followers  accept  liim.  This  crass  literal  interpretation  is  to- 
day the  chief  handicap  that  prevents  the  acceptance  of  his  teaching 
or  the  admiration  of  his  life.  Our  modern  mind  cannot  worship  with- 
out subtle  psychological,  even  if  imconscious,  reservations,  not  to  say 
stultification,  a  being  whose  claim  rests  upon  multiplying  loaves  of 
bread,  changing  water  to  vdne,  walking  on  the  water,  raising  the  dead 
to  life,  heaHng  instantly  a  group  of  lepers  at  a  distance  by  a  word,  etc., 
for  such  things  belong  to  the  shadow-land  of  fiction  and  not  to  that 
of  historic  fact.  The  future  of  Christianity  demands  the  emphatic 
and  authoritative  repudiation  of  such  encumbering  infantilism,  neces- 
sary and  inevitable  as  this  was  at  the  beginning  of  our  lera.  Miracles 
will  perhaps  always  have  a  high  value  as  illustrations  of  the  state  and 
disposition  of  the  mind  of  those  nearest  to  Jesus  and  their  successors. 
They  are  also  serviceable  as  types  of  higher  psychic  meaning.  But 
even  the  latter  cannot  be  seen  and  felt  until  every  vestige  of  the  credu- 
lity that  accepts  them  in  any  sense  or  degree,  as  literal,  physical  events, 
is  purgated  from  the  soul  and  our  faith  thereby  made  purer  and  clearer. 
Nothing  would  sweep  away  so  many  modern  repugnances  to  Chris- 
tianity as  this  complete  katharsis  of  theurgy.  None  sin  so  grievously 
against  the  true  spirit  of  the  person  and  doctrine  of  Jesus  as  those  who 
champion  the  efifete  orthodoxy  that  thus  materializes  the  spiritual. 

(A)  The  Healing  Miracles, — P.  Dearmer  enumerates  forty  mir- 
acles of  healing  by  Jesus  in  the  Gospels.  Of  these  twenty-one  were 
recorded  by  one  EvangeUst,  eight  by  two,  eleven  by  three,  and  none  by 
all.  Matthew  reports  twenty-one,  six  of  which  are  peculiar  to  him; 
Mark  records  eighteen,  three  of  which  are  his  only;  Luke  twenty- four, 
eight  of  which  are  peculiar  to  him;  and  the  only  four  by  John  are 
mentioned  by  him  alone.  Keim's  enumeration  does  not  differ  very 
much  from  this.  As  to  the  genetic  order  of  the  miracles  it  would  be 
sad  if  we  must  indeed  abandon  all  knowledge.  The  Gospels  differ 
very  widely  in  their  sequences,  and  some  writers  now,  according  to 


598  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

the  fashion  of  certain  ages  in  the  past,  have  selected  one  or  another 
EvangeUst  as  the  norm.  Some  group  them  by  an  artificial  system  that 
either  ignores  or  disallows  the  historic  process.  Miracle  cycles,  too,  are 
sometimes  centred  about  the  Galilean  or  Jerusalemic  periods.  We  can 
distinguish  by  various  attendant  circumstances  some  four  of  them  as 
early,  and  some  six  or  eight  as  late  in  Jesus'  public  career ;  and  on  the  cycle 
theory  perhaps  the  greatest  of  them  centre  about  the  second  of  the  per- 
iods, perhaps  near  its  end.  The  Cana  and  Capernaum  miracles,  which  the 
three  synoptists  placed  first,  many  regard  as  parts  of  an  artificial  program. 
The  records  in  those  Gospels  supposed  to  have  been  written  last 
do  not  suggest  a  gleaning  of  miracles  hitherto  unrecorded,  but  give 
abundant  evidence  that  the  miraculous  element  was  on  the  increase. 
The  same  event  is  elaborated  later,  as  if  during  the  period  between 
the  first  and  the  last  even  of  the  synoptists,  the  taste  for  the  super- 
natural was  growing.  Thus,  as  we  pass  from  Matthew  or  Mark  to 
Luke  and  John,  the  demands  on  our  faith  are  augmented.  The 
diseases  are  of  longer  duration,  and  graver,  the  cure  is  wrought  on  more 
persons,  and  sometimes  the  point  of  death  seems  to  have  become  death 
itself.  The  healing  methods  are  more  circumstantially  recorded  and 
thus  often  made  more  mysterious.  Haupt  gives  an  exquisite  case  of 
the  growth  of  a  Mohammedan  miracle  four  times  recorded.  In  the 
first  the  prophet  at  a  certain  point  in.  his  story  rests  under  a  leafy  tree. 
In  the  second  record,  years  later,  he  stands  under  it  as  if  expectant  of 
something  supernatural.  In  the  third  Allah  led  him  to  the  tree,  while 
in  the  fourth  he  caused  it  to  grow  for  the  purpose.  The  many  discrep- 
ancies in  the  parallel  records  respecting  detail  in  the  Gospels  are  very 
suggestive  of  growth,  and  yet  the  unanimity  that  is  dominant  furnishes 
now  one  of  the  chief  arguments  for  a  common  source  older  than  any  of 
our  Gospels.  There  is  repeated  allusion  to  a  large  number  of  un- 
recorded miracles,  but  if  the  source  were  unlimited  there  is  reason  to 
beUeve  that  those  recorded  would  not  so  often  be  the  same.  Recent 
criticism  holds  that  the  actual  authors  of  our  Gospels  were  themselves 
in  no  case  witnesses  to  the  mighty  works  they  describe.  Some  of  them, 
at  least,  wrote  after  this  source  had  for  some  time  been  dry.  The  double 
and  triple  narratives  show  how  very  fluctuating  was  the  tradition,  so 
that  in  several  cases  we  are  left  in  doubt  whether  the  record  is  of  the 
same  or  of  different  events.  A  few  miracles  are  perhaps  figures  of 
speech,  or  parables  taken  literally,  like  the  draft  of  fishes,  or  the  threat 


THE  MIRACLES  599 

against  the  barren  fig-tree  which  later  appears  as  the  stupendous  mir- 
acle of  its  being  withered  at  a  distance  by  a  curse.  Some  moral  pre- 
cepts may  have  been  developed  into  a  visible  description,  as  if  Isaiah's 
prophecy  of  the  healing  of  the  blind,  deaf,  lame,  lepers,  were  factual- 
ized.  Symbolic  picture-stories  undoubtedly  exist,  but  not  to  an 
extent  to  justify  Herder's  behef  that  all  the  marvels  were  pictures  of 
ideas.  We  have  (i)  sometimes  a  material  event  as  a  starting  point, 
core,  or  minimum  of  truth  at  its  lowest  potence.  Jesus  often  depre- 
cates the  lust  for  sensuous  marvels  because  he  wishes  his  truth  to  attain 
a  higher  power,  and  the  difference  of  the  spiritual  meaning  in  the  dif- 
ferent synoptists  accounts  for  some  of  their  discrepancies.  Thus  we 
have  (2)  the  meanings  which  are  to  be  embodied,  the  stilling  of  the 
storm,  e.  g.,  by  the  captain  who  will  bring  the  ship  of  the  Church  into  a 
safe  port,  the  bhndness  which  is  really  of  the  heart,  not  of  the  eyes. 
(3)  Another  germ  from  which  some  of  the  miracles  were  developed  is 
plainly  traceable  to  the  Old  Testament,  while  others  sprang  from  the 
psychic  life  of  Jesus  himself,  who  healed  from  sheer  compassion.  (4) 
Healing  was  one  of  the  chief  functions  of  the  traditional  Messiah  and 
one  of  the  signs  by  which  he  was  to  be  known. 

One  centre  of  intellectual  interest  is  how  Jesus  effects  his  healings. 
He  often  touches  or  lays  hands  upon  the  sick,  lifts  them  up,  anoints, 
uses  saliva,  puts  his  finger  in  the  ear  of  the  deaf  mute,  prescribes  wash- 
ing or  bathing,  takes  his  place  at  the  side  of  or  has  him  stand  forth, 
inquires  as  if  making  a  diagnosis,  prescribes  rest  and  diet.  Paulus 
thinks  he  had  all  the  medical  skill  of  the  Essenes  and  used  their  rem- 
edies. Others  hold  conversely  that  his  reluctance  to  heal  was  due 
to  his  conscious  lack  of  knowledge  of  the  art  and  still  others  have  urged 
that  he  yielded  to  pressure  and  acquired  later  some  hasty  knowledge 
of  it.  Venturini  assumed  that  the  disciples  carried  about  a  portable 
medicine  chest.  Some  of  Jesus'  patients  or  their  friends  deemed  man- 
ual contact  especially  efficacious,  and  it  is  the  later  records  that  amplify 
methods.  Besides  using  the  rationalists'  herbs  and  tinctures  Weiss 
thinks  that  Jesus  was  charged  to  an  unusual  extent  not  merely  with 
animal  but  a  higher  personal  magnetism  of  a  pecuHar  kind,  and  de- 
velops the  theory  that  the  progressive  loss  of  this  by  his  cures,  his  men- 
tal activities,  and  his  anxieties,  caused  his  death.  Gutsmuths  thinks 
Jesus  had  a  power  of  voluntarily  transferring  nervous  force  in  some 
kind.    Renan  thinks  some  of  the  miracles  deliberate  jugglery  justified 


6oo  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

by  their  moral  or  pedagogic  end,  while  Rothe  postulated  some  as  yet 
unknown  but  nevertheless  natural  force. 

More  potent  than  all  these  physical  therapeutic  agencies,  unless 
it  be  touch  alone,  was  the  power  of  the  spoken  word:  "Be  thou 
clean";  "as  thou  hast  believed";  "arise  and  walk";  "come  forth"; 
"thou  art  loosed";  "stretch  forth  thy  hand";  "take  up  thy  bed  and 
walk";  "thou  art  made  whole";  "go  in  peace";  "sin  no  more"; 
"thy  faith  hath  saved  thee";  to  the  filthy  spirit,  "come  out  of  him." 
Thus  there  was  no  set  formula,  but  all  these  phrases  show  intense 
confidence  and  authority  on  Jesus'  part,  and  this  naturally  inspired 
assurance  or  faith  on  the  part  of  the  patients.  Sometimes  it  seems 
as  if  the  whole  energy  of  his  soul  went  forth  in  such  words,  motivated 
by  his  indomitable  faith  in  himself  and  his  mission.  This  is  more 
apparent  in  the  later  writings,  indicating  growth  in  the  belief  of  some 
specific  magical  power.  The  word  alone  without  physical  manipula- 
tion is  more  common  in  Jesus'  healing  miracles  than  in  those  of  the 
ancient  prophets. 

Again,  cure  presupposes  not  only  a  strong  desire  for  it  on  the  pa- 
tient's part,  but  an  intense  belief  that  it  will  be  attained.    The  sick 
crowd  about  Jesus  or  are  brought  by  friends.    They  beg,  cry  out,  fall 
down,  or  their  relatives  entreat  for  them.    The  centurion  asked  for 
only  a  word  in  absentia.    Faith  is  shown  in  the  many  forms  that  this 
desire  takes  and  is  measured  by  the  obstacles  that  are  overcome.    One 
is  let  down  through  the  roof.    The  bUnd  will  not  be  silenced,  but  cry 
out  yet  louder.    The  woman  for  whom  physicians  could  do  nothing 
is  certain  Jesus  can  heal  her.    So  great  became  his  repute  and  fame 
that  assurance  in  advance  may  have  preformed  or  initiated  the  restora- 
tive work.    On  his  part  the  chief  demand  was  just  this  intense  faith. 
"Do  ye  believe  that  I  can  do  this?"    "Be  it  according  to  thy  faith. " 
WTiere  it  is  faint  he  encourages  it  in  the  germ  by  promises,  and  where 
it  is  absent  he  reproves.    In  faith  on  the  patient's  part  he  often  sees 
the  complete  and  sufficient  cause  of  the  cure,  and  without  it  he  some- 
times can  or  will  do  nothing.    Like  the  physical  agencies,  it  is,  of 
course,  possible  that  where  not  mentioned  it  is  implied  or  presup- 
posed.   In  one  remarkable  case  he  heals  by  forgiving  sins.    If  the 
omission  to  mention  faith  is  more  frequent  in  the  later  Gospels,  this 
may  imply  a  growing  belief  in  Jesus'  own  initiative,  as  if  the  human 
co6peration  were  increasingly  felt  to  be  subordinate,  or  as  if  to  heal 


THE  MIRACLES  6oi 

without  it  meant  more  glory  to  the  physician.  This  is  the  trend  most 
marked  in  John.  Faith  of  friends  is  often  effective.  The  demoniacs 
felt  instant  alarm  as  if  dimly  conscious  from  afar  of  Jesus'  power,  and 
were  both  attracted  and  aroused  to  a  high  pitch  of  excitement  by  his 
very  presence.  They  not  only  leave  all  activity  to  him  but  abjure 
him  to  depart,  so  that  instead  of  cooperation  of  faith  there  is  here 
intense  resistance  to  be  overcome,  and  yet  there  are  traces  of  schizo- 
phrenia, for  while  the  evil  spirit  that  possessed  them  objected  to  the 
cure,  the  remnant  of  sanity  that  remained  in  them  not  only  beUeved 
but  desired  it. 

The  result  of  Jesus'  healing  activity  is  instantaneous  as  well  as 
sometimes  telepathic.  Cures  were  usually  signalized  by  immediate 
and  sometimes  intense  physical  activity,  and  also  by  praising  and  proc- 
lamation. This  of  course  intensified  the  impressiveness  of  the  miracle; 
and  if  what  we  know  of  the  effect  of  psychic  trauma  and  shock  detracts 
from  the  credibility  of  some  of  the  cures,  it  certainly  adds  greatly  to 
that  of  others.  All  the  EvangeUsts  imply  that  such  events  had  never 
been  known  before,  although  they  do  not,  Keim  urges,  intimate  that 
they  were  in  any  case  opposed  to  the  unknown  laws  of  man's  higher 
nature.  They  were  not  investigators;  and  if  they  were  credulous, 
this  quality  was  the  outcrop  of  just  that  belief  that  wbrked  the  cure. 
Thus  the  defects  and  exaggerations  of  the  record  permit  our  doubt  as 
well  as  our  faith.  These  writers  used  their  reason  upon  their  second- 
hand, but  to  their  mind  well-authenticated,  data  on  which  their  con- 
clusions were  based.  While  Jesus  certainly  preferred  to  heal  the  soul 
rather  than  the  body,  he  perhaps  accommodated  to  the  demands  of 
those  about  him  to  be  healed  of  diseases,  because  of  a  growing  insight 
on  his  part  into  the  closeness  of  the  bond  between  the  psyche  and  the 
soma,  growing  thus  more  completely  into  the  sphere  of  interest  of 
those  about  him.  There  has  been  much  but  vain  discussion  whether 
or  not  the  records  of  his  words  and  doctrines  are  more  or  less  distorted 
than  those  of  his  deeds.  Some  have  urged  that  these  great  works  made 
the  Incarnation  more  complete  than  if  he  had  preached  more  and  done 
less;  but  surely  biographers  are  less  Uable  to  go  astray  in  reporting 
the  things  done  by  those  of  whom  they  write  than  in  setting  forth  their 
undocumented  opinions,  because  in  the  latter  the  subjective  factor 
would  inevitably  have  more  scope. 

Padolean  gathered  many  instances  to  show  that  a  pure  and 


6o2  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

devoted  life  of  sanctity  not  only  has  always  been  thought  to  have  great 
therapeutic  power,  but  in  his  opinion  really  has  it,  and  to  prove  that  a 
morally  perfect  life  heals  by  infection  quite  apart  from  the  natural 
influence  of  a  magisterial  will  upon  an  oppressed  one,  and  independently 
of  any  theory  such  as  that  the  psyche  is  so  bound  up  with  the  soma  that 
to  cure  spiritual  distempers  the  body  must  be  first  made  whole.  If 
faith  meant  to  Jesus  a  summons  that  he  could  not  resist,  and  if  he  had 
to  heal  by  an  inner  necessity  of  his  nature,  as  we  are  often  told,  then 
why  is  he  represented  as  healing  now  with  an  almost  Buddhistic  calm 
and  imperturbabiHty,  at  another  time  as  if  with  an  outbreak  of  rage 
against  Satan  and  his  morbific  agencies,  and  yet  again  as  healing  with 
sighs  and  groans  as  if  beside  himself,  or  in  a  nervous  paroxysm,  or 
making  an  intense  agonistic  effort?  It  is  entirely  impossible  to  cor- 
relate these  differences  of  his  attitude  with  differences  in  the  nature  of 
the  disease  or  with  the  degree  of  illness  of  his  patients.  Moreover, 
now  he  represents  his  cures  as  God's  work,  and  again  as  so  genuinely 
human  that  his  followers  could  even  surpass  him.  He  was  as  far  as 
possible  from  any  consistent  theory  or  method,  and  we  do  not  need  to 
adduce  Hume's  theory  that  a  miracle  from  its  very  nature  is  incapable 
of  being  proved  because  the  best  possible  human  testimony  is  less 
infallible  than  nature's  laws.  The  evidence  of  the  Gospel  records  of 
some  of  the  miracles  is  not  only  impugnable  but  suspicious  from  every 
point  of  view.  So  flimsy,  indeed,  is  it  that  it  offers  only  a  very  poor 
pretext  for  the  wish  to  believe  to  gratify  itself,  and  yet  this  desire  is 
often  so  strong,  especially  toward  healing  miracles,  that  even  a  hint 
suffices.  Furthermore,  the  accounts  of  Jesus'  healing  activities  are 
given  a  somewhat  higher  degree  of  plausibility  in  recent  decades  by 
psychotherapeutic  studies,  so  that  it  is  safer  to  assume  in  some  of 
these  instances  a  nucleus  of  fact  than  it  is  in  the  nature  miracles. 
We  now  pass  to  the  discussion  of  the  chief  individual  miracles  grouped 
into  classes.  ^ 

The  First  Healing. — With  four  of  his  disciples  then  chosen,  Jesus 
proceeded,  directly  after  the  temptation,  to  the  home  of  Peter  and 
Andrew,  where  the  mother-in-law  of  the  former  lay  ill  of  a  fever,  which 
most  exegetes  who  have  ventured  any  conjecture  think  probably,  owing 
to  the  nature  of  the  country  and  the  modern  health  conditions  there, 

>C.  W.  Waddle:  "Miracles  of  Healing."  Am.  Jour.  Psychol.,  looo,  pp.  ai9-t68  (with  an  excellent  bibliography  to 
date).  A»  a  typical  modern  cure  see  Floumoy:  "  Une  Mystique  Moderne  (Documents  pour  la  Psycbolojie  Relijfieuse)." 
Arch,  dt  Piyckol.,  igis,  T.iSi  114  P. 


THE  MIRACLES  603 

was  malarial.  Matthew  says  that  Jesus  went  in  and  touched  or  took 
her  hand  in  greeting,  and  she  arose  and  ministered  as  housewife  to  her 
guests.  Matthew's  narrative  is  simple,  human,  and  natural,  the 
"cure"  unintentional,  and  the  result  perhaps  a  little  surprising  to 
Jesus  himself.  The  bystanders  thought  it  marvellous,  and  the  impres- 
sion it  made  on  them  reflected  into  his  own  mind  may  have  given  him 
his  first  sense  of  power  as  a  healer.  The  credulity  of  the  town  folk 
grew  to  a  most  embarrassing  degree  that  day.  Even  the  other  Gospels 
show  the  beginnings  of  mythic  accretion  and  elaboration.  Luke  and 
Mark  add  various  items,  e.  g.,  of  the  guests.  Jesus  was  told  about  the 
invalid,  his  aid  was  besought,  the  fever  was  said  to  be  great,  he  rebuked 
the  disease,  Hfted  her  up;  the  cure  is  said  to  be  immediate.  The  later 
recorders  evidently  thought,  as  the  Church  has  since  done,  that  this 
was  a  miracle,  and  so  very  likely  did  the  four  companions  of  Jesus; 
but  it  is  only  honest  candour  and  not  carping  to  remember  how  many 
persons,  and  especially  housekeepers,  have  responded  to  sudden  calls 
made  upon  them  as  hostesses,  to  entertain  distinguished  people,  and 
that  while  so  doing  they  have  forgotten  all  sense  of  illness.  This 
woman  knew,  perhaps,  that  this  was  the  master  her  son-in-law  and  his 
brother  were  to  follow,  and  she  naturally  wished  to  send  them  off  from 
this  parting  visit  with  pleasant  memories,  for  there  would  be  time 
enough  to  rest  and  recuperate  when  they  were  gone.  Moreover,  the 
very  presence  of  the  hero  of  the  hour,  as  Jesus  certainly  was  that  day, 
and  especially  the  impressiveness  of  his  magnetic  presence  in  itself — 
such  things  are  often  the  best  medicine.  And,  again,  there  was  the 
added  stimulus  of  an  approaching  throng. 

As  the  sun  was  setting  there  were  brought  to  Jesus  at  this  humble 
home  all  the  possessed  and  those  with  diverse  other  illnesses,  and  all 
the  town  gathered;  and  Mark  says  he  healed  many  of  diverse  diseases 
and  cast  out  many  devils.  Matthew  says  he  healed  all  with  his  word, 
while  Luke  says  he  laid  on  his  hands  and  healed  every  one,  and  many 
from  whom  devils  were  cast  out  acknowledged  that  their  healer  was 
Christ  the  Son  of  God.  None  remained  ill  in  that  region  that  night. 
Matthew  even  adds  that  thus  a  prophecy  might  be  fulfilled  to  the 
effect  that  he  took  our  infirmities  and  bare  our  sicknesses.  This  idea 
of  prophecy-fulfilment  is,  of  course,  always  suspicious  because  Jesus' 
feeling  that  he  was  fulfilling  ancient  predictions  or  decrees,  imparted 
to  his  chroniclers,  made  them,  however  unconsciously,  tend  to  fit  their 


6o4  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

records  to  these  old  vaticinations.  In  this  thrice-attested  twiKght 
clinic  we  seem  to  have  real  healing  power,  of  the  genuine  effectiveness 
of  which,  in  view  of  so  many  modem  instances,  we  need  not  be  in- 
credulous, although,  as  so  often,  the  impression  of  it  increases  with  the 
successive  Gospelographers,  Mark,  as  usual,  being  most  temperate 
and  Luke  most  prone  to  amphfy  without  critical  restraint.  Mental 
healers  of  many  types  and  theories,  EmmanueUsts  and  still  better  of 
late,  men  like  Dejerine,  Dubois,  Marcinowski,  and  Rosenbach,  have 
accredited  the  power  of  the  soul  to  cure  many  of  the  ailments  not 
organic  or  bacteriological,  that  it  can  make.  Jesus'  methods  were  more 
like  those  of  a  consummate  medicine  man,  being  chiefly  without  set 
method,  but  direct  and  immediate,  and  this  had  been  an  epoch- 
making  day  in  his  career  which,  had  we  its  date,  the  Church  would 
perhaps  still  celebrate.  We  have  probably  as  yet  by  no  means  sounded 
all  the  powers  and  wonders  that  the  imagination  when  strongly 
appealed  to  can  work  in  casting  off  or  defying  disease,  and  we  have  still 
to  lay  to  heart  the  lesson  that  even  savage  medicine,  which  this  was 
far  above,  though  in  the  same  spirit,  has  yet  to  teach  modern  therapy. 
Finally,  of  no  single  day  of  Jesus'  career,  save  only  the  second  preceding 
the  Crucifixion,  have  we  so  full  a  record,  sketchy  as  it  is. 

Blindness. — Isaiah  represents  that  the  joy  of  being  permitted  to 
return  from  the  Captivity  was  so  great  as  to  heal  diseases.  But  as 
the  prophetic  program  of  a  return  and  a  re-establishment  of  the  old 
glory  of  Jerusalem  was  not  carried  out,  such  expectation  of  cures  of  the 
blind,  deaf,  and  lame,  as  he  specifies,  was  extended  on  to  the  day  of  the 
Messiah.  Hence,  when  Jesus  was  recognized  as  the  Messiah,  there 
was  an  accumulated  store  of  expectation  which  constituted  a  large 
fund  of  popular  faith  for  him  to  draw  upon.  The  healing  of  prophecy 
was  always  and  purely  symbolically  meant,  but  in  the  above  process 
of  postponement  the  conceptions  of  such  cures  were  more  and  more 
grossly  materialized.  Hence  such  structures  as  the  evangelical  legends 
of  healing  were  ready  in  a  moment  by  a  touch  of  suggestion  to  take  on  a 
hteral  form.  Making  the  blind  see  in  prophecy  always  meant  spirit- 
ually, but  the  Evangelists  interpret  each  miracle  of  this  kind  which 
they  make  Jesus  perform  as  hteral  and  sensuous.  They  not  only  often 
lack  all  spiritual  insight  themselves,  even  where  this  meaning  is  obvious, 
but  sometimes  take  the  very  greatest  pains  that  all  be  made  to  appear 
historical  and  physical  only.     In  the  story  of  the  cure  of  the  blind 


THE  MIRACLES  605 

man  of  Jericho,  Luke,  and  still  more  Mark,  add  picturesque  details 
which  contribute  to  give  it  an  almost  Defoe-like  verisimilitude. 
Mark,  who  began  this  materialization  of  psychic  miracles,  saw  nothing 
else  in  them;  but  John,  in  whom  this  tendency  culminated,  sees  also 
along  with  the  natural  a  spiritual  and  ideal  meaning.  And  it  was  the 
force  of  his  conviction  of  the  latter  which  impelled  him  to  amplify 
and  historicize  the  former.  Jesus'  life  is  the  light  of  men.  To  the  still 
incorrigible  unbeUef  of  the  Jews,  Jesus  was  come  that  "  they  which  see 
not  might  see,  and  that  they  which  see  might  be  made  blind,"  thus 
equating  the  two  processes  although  he  did  not  literally  put  out  eyes, 
that  is,  he  did  no  penal  miracles  of  this  kind.  In  the  literature  of 
modern  psychoanalysis  we  do,  however,  have  cases  in  which  mental 
bUndness  is  the  result  of  the  will  or  wish  of  the  unconscious  part  of 
our  nature  converted  downward  into  diseases  of  the  eyesight,  into  which 
we  take  flight.  John  made  his  stories  as  real  as  testimony  knew  how 
to  make  anything  in  his  day,  because  he  dimly  saw  at  the  same  time 
that  the  incidents  were  supercharged  with  symbolic  meaning. 

Thus,  that  the  blind  should  be  made  to  see  is  not  only  one  of  the 
traits  of  Isaiah's  Messianic  age,  but  it  is  the  very  Hfe  of  the  Logos- 
Christ  who  was  the  light  of  the  world  shining  into  a  darkness  that  com- 
prehended it  not.  Moreover,  from  the  gnostics  to  Wundt's  parallel- 
ism of  perception  and  apperception,  vision  is  the  closest  analogue  of 
knowing.  Visual  imagery  is  one  of  the  most  inseparable  elements  of 
the  higher  thought  processes,  and  blind-mindedness  involves  the  grav- 
est kind  of  mental  imperfection.  Thus  it  was  nothing  less  than  a  fore- 
gone conclusion  that  Jesus,  the  great  and  good  Lucifer  or  light-bringer, 
would  have  to  be  thought  a  healer  of  blindness.  Indeed,  from  the 
imputation  of  this  power  he  could  not  escape,  however  much  he  might 
desire  to  do  so. 

In  the  first  or  Bethesda  cure  of  this  kind  (Mark  only)  a  blind  man 
was  brought  to  (not  sought  by)  Jesus,  imploring  him  to  touch  him,  in 
accordance  with  the  widespread  view  that  healing  influences  emanated 
from  famous  men.  Jesus  led  him  by  the  hand  out  of  town,  whether  to 
make  a  better  private  diagnosis,  or  to  make  an  unobserved  experiment, 
or  to  keep  the  case  a  secret  one,  and  spat  in  his  eyes  saliva,  then  thought 
in  folklore  to  have  great  therapeutic  power,  instead  of  being  deemed  as 
now  a  prolific  source  of  infection.  Even  yet  saliva  is  a  popular  remedy 
in  many  lands  for  eye  troubles.    Jesus  also  laid  his  hands  upon  him 


6o6  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

and  asked  him  if  he  could  see.  He  replied  he  could  only  see  men  as 
trees  walking.  After  a  second  imposition  of  hands,  however,  we  are 
told  "he  saw  every  man  clearly,"  and  was  told  to  go  home  and  say 
nothing  of  it  in  town,  RationaUsts  have  often  objected  that  a  second 
imposition  of  hands  meant  a  limitation  of  the  infinite  divine  healing 
power,  and  it  is  a  fact  that  one  element  in  the  aggrandized  cures  which 
Jesus  is  reported  to  have  wrought  is  that  they  were  immediate  and  not 
like  this  in  stages,  as  if  in  order  for  more  effective  demonstration. 
But  the  impUcation  was  that  there  were  no  spectators  and  that  even 
knowledge  of  how  the  cure  was  wrought  must  have  come  from  either 
Jesus  or  his  patient.  Perhaps,  said  Paulus,  Jesus  somehow  manipu- 
lated out  of  his  eyes  some  very  aggravating  dust  or  possibly  some  mor- 
bid growth  that  had  rendered  vision  imperfect;  or,  says  Venturini, 
he  may  possibly  have  removed  a  cataract  with  his  fingernail,  and  per- 
haps he  made  two  steps  in  the  operation  because,  as  we  know  now,  to 
heal  too  suddenly  would  have  been  dangerous. 

In  the  Jericho  restoration  from  bUndness  recorded  by  the  three 
synoptists,  Matthew  and  Mark  say  there  were  two,  while  Luke  says 
only  one  blind  man,  Bartimaeus.  Mark  says  it  was  on  the  way  to,  and 
Matthew  and  Luke  say  it  was  on  the  way  from,  the  city.  Mark  makes 
his  blind  man  arise  and  come  to  Jesus  at  his  call,  casting  off  his  gar- 
ments, and  there  are  other  discrepancies,  although  the  weight  of  opinion 
is  that  we  have  here  different  versions  of  the  same  incident  and  not 
different  cures.  The  bUnd  men  cried  out  to  Jesus  as  son  of  David,  and 
continued  to  do  so  all  the  more  when  told  to  hold  their  peace.  Jesus 
asked  what  they  wanted  him  to  do.  They  replied,  to  restore  their 
sight.  Matthew  says  he  pitied  them  and  touched  their  eyes,  while 
Mark  and  Luke  say  he  pronounced  them  cured  by  virtue  of  their  faith. 
Their  sight  was  immediately  restored,  and  they  followed  Jesus,  and  the 
people  glorified  God.  Here  nothing  is  implied  of  the  nature  or  cause 
of  the  bhndness,  or  how  complete  the  cure  was.  This  surpasses 
Elisha's  removal  of  the  penal  blindness  inflicted  on  his  enemies  as  a 
result  of  his  prayer.  These  patients  not  only  wanted  to  be  cured  but 
had  faith,  neither  of  which  is  intimated  in  the  Bethesda  case.  Ven- 
turini makes  the  gratuitous  assumption  that  Jesus  healed  their  eyes 
with  a  tonic  lotion  he  carried  to  purge  away  the  irritating  dust  which  in 
those  regions  was  so  detrimental  to  vision.  In  both  the  above  cases 
there  is  no  hint  of  symbolic  significance.    The  healing  is  a  purely 


THE  MIRACLES  607 

physical  restoration  to  sight,  as  marvellous  as  in  the  very  few  modem 
instances  of  restoration  from  congenital  cataract  by  a  surgical  opera- 
tion, although  Jesus  acts  with  none  of  the  delicate  apparatus  or  complex 
methods  of  procedure  of  modem  ophthalmology. 

As  in  the  series  of  three  resurrection  narratives,  as  we  shall  see,  so 
here  John  caps  the  climax  by  a  third  which  is  far  more  wonderful  and 
better  attested  than  any  other,  as  if  to  make  all  others  superfluous. 
This  patient  is  blind  from  birth.  As  if  referring  to  an  even-then-current 
behef  that  the  blindness  of  the  newly  born  was  due  to  parental  infec- 
tion, Jesus  was  asked  whether  in  this  case  the  affliction  was  due  to  the 
sin  of  his  parents  or  to  himself  (as  if  congenital  disease  could  be  due 
to  any  sin  of  its  unfortunate  victim).  Jesus  replied  that  neither  had 
sinned,  but  that  this  patient  was  born  thus  in  order  that  in  his  cure 
the  divine  power  might  be  shown  forth.  For  this  reason  the  blind 
man  was  not  brought  to  but  discovered  by  Jesus,  who,  stating  that  he 
was  the  light  of  the  world,  made  a  mixture  of  clay  and  spittle  and 
appHed  it,  teUing  the  man  to  go  wash  in  the  pool  of  Siloam,  which 
meant  "sent,"  as  he  was  sent.  This  he  did  and  came  seeing.  Here  we 
are  told  of  no  petition  to  be  cured  either  by  the  patient  or  his  friends, 
but  the  restitution  to  sight  seems  to  have  been  made  on  Jesus'  own 
initiative.  The  scene  of  this  miracle  is  placed  in  Jemsalem  also  on 
the  Sabbath  and  as  if  to  make  this  only  case  of  healing  bhndness  which 
John  records  a  perfect  and  unimpugnable  bit  of  testimony,  the  restored 
patient  is  made  the  subject  of  a  formal  and  rather  elaborate  hearing. 
First  came  the  question  of  identity.  Some  said  it  was  the  blind  beggar 
that  they  had  often  seen,  and  others  were  not  sure  of  anything  more 
than  a  resemblance;  but  he  declared,  "I  am  he."  Interrogated  as  to 
how  he  was  cured,  he  replied  by  telling  just  what  "the  man  called 
Jesus"  had  done,  and  how  he  washed  and  saw.  He  was  asked  where 
Jesus  then  was,  but  did  not  know.  Next  he  was  taken  to  the  Pharisees, 
who  asked  the  same  and  received  the  same  response.  They  wrangled, 
some  thinking  that  the  healer  could  not  be  of  God  or  he  would  not  have 
violated  the  law  by  heaUng  on  the  Sabbath,  while  others  maintained 
that  no  sinner  could  perform  such  a  cure.  The  patient  was  again  asked 
what  he  had  to  say  of  his  curer,  and  he  replied  that  he  was  a  prophet. 
Doubting  whether  he  had  really  been  born  blind,  his  parents  were 
summoned,  and  they  testified  first  that  he  was  their  son  and  second 
that  he  was  born  blind.    But  in  this  affidavit  they  averred  that  they 


6o8  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

did  not  know  who  opened  his  eyes,  and  advised  that  the  son  be  asked 
for  he  was  of  age,  because,  knowing  that  any  one  who  confessed  Christ 
would  be  excommunicated,  they  were  afraid.  They  were  thus  made 
unwilling  witnesses,  and  hence  all  the  more  credible.  Again  the  pa- 
tient was  called  and  told  to  praise  God  though  he  had  been  cured  by  a 
sinner,  to  which  he  stoutly  replied  that  whether  his  healer  had  been  a 
sinner  or  not  mattered  not  to  him.  He  only  knew  that  whereas  he  was 
blind  he  now  saw.  Told  again  to  describe  his  cure,  he  refused,  asking 
tauntingly  if  they  intended  to  become  Jesus'  disciples.  They  replied 
that  they  were  disciples  of  Moses,  but  that  he  was  a  disciple  of  Jesus, 
adding  that  they  knew  not  whence  this  fellow  Jesus  was.  The  patient, 
however,  averred  that  Jesus  must  be  the  Son  of  God  for  since  the  world 
began  no  one  ever  heard  before  of  a  cure  of  congenital  blindness.  For 
his  temerity  in  thus  taimting  them  the  patient  was  called  a  sinner  and 
expelled.  Then  Jesus  sought  him,  asking  if  he  believed  him  to  be  the 
Son  of  God.  "  Who  is  that?"  the  man  asked;  and  when  Jesus  rephed, 
"  I  am  he,"  the  man  believed  and  worshipped.  Jesus  declared  that  he 
came  "  that  those  who  see  not  might  see  and  those  which  see  might  be 
made  blind."  "Are  we  then  blind?"  asked  the  Pharisees,  and  they 
were  told  that  if  they  were  blind  they  would  have  no  sin,  but  because 
they  see  their  sin  remains.  Then  after  a  Johannin  discourse  the  Jews 
are  left,  still  disputing,  some  saying  that  he  was  a  devil  and  mad,  and 
others  saying  that  a  devil  could  neither  discourse  as  he  had  just  done 
nor  cure  the  blind. 

These  three  are  the  chief  and  only  circumstantially  described  ac- 
counts of  healing  blindness,  although  Jesus  is  elsewhere  represented  as 
healing  many  other  cases.  The  case  John  reports  is  the  chef-d'oeuvre. 
He  attests  the  literalness  of  the  cure  far  more  effectively  than  the  sy- 
noptists  do  theirs,  but  he,  unlike  them,  also  sees  its  symboHc  significance. 
To  any  oculist  or  ophthalmologist  any  and  every  such  cure  is  too  pre- 
posterous to  be  for  a  moment  considered.  Neither  atrophied  centres, 
optic  tracts,  the  retina,  nor  diseases  of  the  anterior  media  in  the  bulbus, 
can  be  made  normal  without  long  treatment  or  very  delicate  operations. 
Hysterical  or  functional  blindness  like  Paul's  of  course  may  be  overcome 
perhaps  spontaneously,  but  this  is  contra-indicated  here  and  would 
be  no  miracle.  We  have  the  rationalistic  explanation  that  Jesus 
knew  the  secret  of  spectacles  and  carried  in  his  medicine  chest,  that 
Paulus  thinks  was  always  present,  an  assortment  of  glasses;  and  he 


THE  MIRACXES  609 

holds  that  the  stories  we  have  are  only  an  exaggerated  account  of  thus 
remedying  myopia,  which  is  now  exceptionally  common  among  the 
Jews,  and  perhaps  was  then.  This,  indeed,  is  hardly  more  absurd 
than  to  say,  as  one  commentator  does,  that  as  glasses  are  made  of  silica, 
the  account  of  mixing  saliva  and  clay  was  the  best  account  John  knew 
how  to  give  of  what  Jesus  really  did,  viz.,  making  glass  and  fashioning 
it  into  lenses  on  the  spot. 

True  miracles  are  things  which  are  absolutely  false.  They  never 
happen.  There  are  of  course  phenomena  of  a  higher  order  than  what 
is  yet  known;  but  they  are  not  these,  for  these  are  only  fabrications, 
and  that  of  a  low  order.  Forever  grateful  as  the  world  must  be  to  the 
authors  of  the  four  Gospels  (for  they  constitute  by  far  the  best  part  of 
the  New  Testament),  their  merit  does  not  consist  in  themselves,  for 
they  did  not  write  infallibly  and  had  no  inspiration  save  that  which 
came  from  the  exalted  and  inspired  character  who  was  their  central 
theme.  They  give  us  well-meant  and  painstaking  reports  of  the  most 
impressive  life  that  the  world  has  contained.  Compared  to  their 
theme  and  task,  their  intelligence  and  performance  are  wretchedly  in- 
adequate and  often  misleading.  If  their  bhndness  had  been  removed 
how  much  more  precious  their  records,  for  to  see  Jesus  through  them 
is  to  see  through  a  glass  darkly. 

Why,  then,  the  persistent  credulity  of  so  many  who  should  know 
better  concerning  this  class  of  marvels?  The  answer  is,  because  these 
records  are  so  overdetermined  by  the  higher  meanings  which  they 
embody.  The  teachings  of  Jesus  are  so  illuminating  that  once  to 
understand  them  is  like  light  banishing  darkness.  One  who  has  really 
accepted  the  rule  of  service  in  place  of  the  rule  of  self  is  like  a  being 
restored  to  sight.  The  ethical  and  altruistic  viewpoint  is  so  like  a 
new  morn  that  there  is  no  possible  symbol  so  pat  and  apposite  to  ex- 
press it  as  the  restoration  of  the  master  sense.  Jesus  is  the  great 
opener  of  the  inner  eyes  to  the  loftier  power  of  spiritual  truth,  and  the 
believer  materializes  this  unique  and  only  fit  metaphor  of  the  new  life. 
He  takes  it  literally  just  so  far  as  he  has  not  yet  grasped  the  meaning 
of  the  higher  illumination  it  stands  for.  These  miracles  are  crypto- 
grams which  most  of  us  cannot  yet  fully  decipher,  but  which,  when 
once  they  have  delivered  up  their  message,  will  be  of  no  further  value. 
The  only  definition  of  light  is  the  excitation  of  the  optic  nerve.  Now 
suppose  there  were  no  eyes  in  the  world,  and  that  at  a  certain  stage 


6io  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

of  evolution  eyes  suddenly  came  into  existence;  with  them  would  of 
course  be  born  all  the  phenomena  of  the  \isible  universe,  its  colours, 
shades,  contours,  perspectives,  etc.  These  miracles  thus  would  be 
the  best  illustration  and  fittest  for  general  currency  of  the  new  psychic 
world  which  Jesus'  doctrine  revealed.  Such  cures,  therefore,  are  only 
parables  misunderstood  as  history.  They  are  degraded,  and  as  it 
were  fossilized,  because  their  significance  has  been  lost  or  dimmed. 
Thus  it  is  the  Hteral  believer  who  is  blind  and  in  need  of  this  cure. 
They  are  vessels  of  vulgar  clay,  precious  only  because  of  their  content 
and  useless  when  it  has  been  appropriated.  Their  perennial  lesson  to 
us  is  that  there  is  a  higher  life,  more  intense,  efficient,  and  ecstatic,  viz., 
that  of  self-sacrifice  and  of  serving  instead  of  ruling,  loving  instead  of 
hating  or  fearing;  a  life  that  is  to  our  present  one  as  wane  to  water;  as 
crawHng  about  near  the  bottom  of  this  dark  and  dirty  sea  of  air  is  to 
Plato's  empyrean  ether  above  in  which  the  gods  lived;  as  health  is  to 
disease;  as  strength  is  to  weakness;  as  winter  to  summer;  as  death  to 
resurrection;  or  here,  in  a  word,  as  darkness  is  to  hght.  These  are  the 
meanings  that  have  kept  alive  the  bizarre  fantasy  of  this  type  of  cure, 
and  the  very  power  of  persistence  of  so  preposterous  a  tale  in  this  civil- 
ized age  is  a  witness  which  only  the  psychoanalyst  can  rightly  evaluate 
of  the  high  potential  current  of  meaning  that  flows  through  it. 

As  a  lofty  and  intricate  building  needs  a  more  solid  foundation 
than  a  cheaper  one,  so  the  miracles  became  in  the  folk-mind  more  crassi- 
fied  than  the  parables,  simply  because  they  have  more  to  support  and 
because  their  meaning  is  more  fundamental  and  generic  and  more 
focussed  on  the  one  central  theme,  while  the  parables  are  more  specific 
and  detailed  in  their  meaning.  Every  miracle  stands  for  a  more 
cardinal  truth  than  any  parable.  The  one  and  the  same  general  truth 
to  which  every  miracle  points  is  a  higher,  more  evolved  superman  state, 
a  more  socialized  condition  farther  on  in  the  developmental  scale, 
while  the  parables  are  devoted  to  specifications  concerning  attitudes 
and  conduct  or  doctrine  ancillary  to  the  supreme  lesson  of  the  Kingdom. 

DeaJ  mutes. — In  the  Gospel  Greek  the  same  word  means  deaf  and 
dumb,  but  only  Mark  connects  them:  Matthew  and  Luke  represent 
Jesus  as  speaking  in  his  answer  to  the  emissaries  of  the  Baptist  only  of 
cases  of  deafness,  while  in  their  own  accounts  they  speak  only  of  dumb- 
ness restored  to  utterance.  Matthew  (only)  tells  the  tale  of  a  man 
brought  to  Jesus  with  a  dumb  devil,  which  was  cast  out  and  he  spoke. 


THE  MIRACLES  6ii 

The  multitude  wondered,  for  "it  was  never  so  seen  in  Israel,"  while 
the  Pharisees  said  he  cast  out  devils  by  their  prince,  Beelzebub.  Then 
Jesus  went  "to  all  cities  and  villages"  preaching  and  "healing  every 
sickness  and  every  disease  among  the  people." 

In  another,  or  some  think  a  different,  version  of  the  same  case, 
Matthew  tells  of  a  man  blind  and  dumb  who  was  restored,  and  the 
people  asked  if  this  did  not  show  that  Jesus  was  the  son  of  David.  In 
Luke's  amplified  account  Jesus  replies  at  length  to  the  charge  of  casting 
out  devils  by  Beelzebub,  by  saying  that  if  he  did  so  Satan's  house 
would  be  divided  against  itself  and  would  fall ;  also,  if  he  can  do  so  he 
must  be  mightier  than  Satan  to  spoil  this  strong  man's  house.  He  tells 
of  an  unclean  spirit  evicted  and  restlessly  roving  till  it  finds  its  old 
habitation  purified  and  then  it  returns,  taking  with  it  seven  other  vile 
spirits.  To  those  who  do  not  desire  to  multiply  miracles  more  than  is 
necessary,  as  the  scholastics  before  Occam  did  entities,  it  may  be  noted 
that  the  fact  and  nature  of  the  illness,  the  association  with  sin,  the 
controversy  with  the  Jews,  the  presence  of  the  crowd,  the  approximate 
stage  of  Jesus'  ministry  in  which  the  event  occurred — all  these  are  the 
same  in  both.  If  the  two  are  different  cases  their  similarity  suggests 
stereotyped  forms  of  apperception  and  description,  while  if  they  are 
different  versions  of  the  same  cure,  very  great  liberty  in  the  treatment 
of  fact  and  fallibility  of  human  testimony  is  indicated.  Woolstan  and 
Paulus  crudely  interpret  the  Johannin  account  as  of  a  slothful  impostor 
or  malingerer  whom  Jesus  detected  and  sent  away.  The  disease  was 
evidently  not  grave  enough  to  have  affected  the  invalid's  mind,  and 
functional  paralysis  of  hypochondriacal  and  hysterical  origin  is  often 
overcome  by  stimulus  or  excitement  strong  enough  to  arouse  dormant 
volition,  as  the  crutches  for  centuries  hung  up  at  many  a  shrine  bear 
witness. 

Another  patient  whom  Matthew  calls  a  lunatic  and  also  possessed, 
as  Luke,  too,  does,  Mark  calls  also  deaf  and  dumb.  Here  the  disciples 
fail,  and  Jesus  goes  to  their  aid  and  calls  the  deaf  and  dumb  spirit  out 
of  the  man,  a  cure  mentioned  elsewhere  among  those  of  the  possessed. 
Mark  (only)  tells  of  a  deaf  man  with  an  impediment  in  his  speech 
whom  Jesus  took  aside,  put  his  fingers  in  his  ears,  spat,  touched  the 
tongue,  looked  up,  sighed  (as  he  did  elsewhere  only  in  raising  Lazarus), 
and  said  a  talismanic  Aramaic  word,  Ephphatha,  be  opened,  and 
straightway  the  string  of  his  tongue  was  loosed,  his  ears  were  opened, 


6i2  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

and  he  spake  plainly.  Charged  not  to  tell,  he  told  all  the  more,  and 
the  people  said  of  his  healer  that  he  "hath  done  all  things  well;  he 
maketh  the  deaf  to  hear  and  the  dumb  to  speak,"  just  as  prophecy 
expected  of  the  Messiah. 

Here  again  it  seems  almost  remissness  and  also  somewhat  out  of 
character  that  the  Johannin  Jesus,  who  was  the  living  word  or  divine 
LogoSj  does  no  miracle  of  this  kind.  Perhaps  John,  whose  Christ  did 
so  completely  all  that  symbolism  required,  thought  that  curing  the 
defect  or  loss  of  audition  was  so  obvious  and  elemental  an  act  and  so 
charged  with  symbolism  concerning  mental  deafness  to  spiritual  truth, 
that  it  was  quite  superfluous  and  that  such  cures  could  be  assumed. 
Others  have  said  that  perhaps  John  on  the  other  hand  underestimated 
the  value  of  volubility,  preferring  a  laconic  yea  and  nay.  To  Jesus, 
hearing  the  word  meant  doing  it;  and  for  him,  unlike  Plato  who  thought 
knowing  half  way  to  doing  and  therefore  good  in  itself,  hearing  without 
doing  augmented  guilt.  To  more  insightful  miracle-makers  the  re- 
moval of  deafness  would  mean  augmented  power  of  understanding, 
such  as  faith  gives,  while  the  removal  of  dumbness  would  mean  power 
to  proclaim  the  new  salvation.  Their  first  act  was  to  disobey  the 
injunction  of  silence  by  an  uncontrollable  impulsion  to  use  their  newly 
acquired  power  of  speech,  the  use  of  which  on  any  other  theme  would 
betray  the  fact  that  they  were  restored  to  the  world  of  sound  and 
phonation.  Of  the  phenomena  following  complete  restoration  from 
utter  and  congenital  deafness  we  know  nothing,  for  there  is  no  such 
case  on  record;  but  this  would  be  a  no  less  eloquent  simile  of  the  birth 
of  a  new  and  higher  mental  function  of  comprehension  than  restoration 
from  total  blindness.  Had  these  patients  been  long  quite  deaf  they 
would  of  course  have  lost  in  a  corresponding  degree  the  power  of  speech, 
so  that  the  parabolic  scope  of  these  cases  is  limited.  On  the  whole, 
there  is  somewhat  more  probability  of  a  germ  of  material  happening 
here  than  in  the  blindness  cures,  although  there  is  an  uncritical  ex- 
aggeration, and  no  gleam  of  suspicion  on  the  part  of  the  narrators  of 
any  higher  meaning. 

The  Lame. — Isaiah  said  that  in  that  day  "the  lame  man  shall  leap 
as  a  hart,"  and  cures  of  palsy,  paralysis,  and  cripples  were  to  be 
expected  in  the  process  of  validifying  the  new  dispensation.  The  mus- 
cles are  the  organs  of  the  will  and  have  done  everything  man  has  accom- 
plished in  the  world.    Loss  of  the  power  of  free,  voluntary  movement 


THE  MIRACLES  613 

hampers  the  passion  for  power  and  brings  in  its  place  a  sense  of  weak- 
ness, which  is  proverbially  miserable  and  has  its  own  type  of  pathos 
and  its  own  copious  higher  symbolism  for  whatever  of  the  many  types 
of  lameness  clinical  diagnosis  distinguishes.  Thus,  artistic  and 
pedagogic  as  well  as  pragmatic  tendencies  could  not  fail  to  work 
unconsciously  if  not  purposively  to  give  us  specific  cures  by  the  great 
physician  of  these  very  numerous,  but,  of  course,  in  the  Gospels  not 
well  differentiated,  classes  of  cases. 

All  three  synoptists,  in  ways  the  discrepancies  of  which  as  usual 
clearly  show  developmental  stages,  tell  of  Jesus  preaching  to  a  crowd 
that  flocked  from  far  and  near.  It  was  so  dense  that  the  four  bearers 
who  had  brought  the  palsied  man  to  him  had  to  mount  the  flat  roof 
and  break  it  open  so  that  they  could  let  down  the  patient  on  his  bed. 
This  show  of  faith  pleased  Jesus.  Strangely  enough,  as  if  recognizing 
a  case  of  luetic  tabes,  and  anticipating  modern  medicine,  he  thought 
the  disease  due  to  infection  from  a  sex  disease  and  so  first  of  all  pro- 
nounced the  patient's  sins  forgiven.  Accused  by  his  enemies  of  blas- 
phemy in  arrogating  to  himself  the  power  of  forgiveness  of  sin,  which 
belonged  to  God  alone,  he  gave  them  to  understand  that  this  first 
phase  of  the  miracle  was  harder  than  to  cure  the  disease,  and  we  are 
almost  given  the  impression  that  the  latter  was  the  extemporized 
result  of  an  afterthought  to  silence  those  who  objected  to  his  act  of 
pardon.  So  the  patient  is  told  to  arise  and  go  home.  This  he  did, 
carrying  his  bed,  and  glorifying  God  as  did  the  crowd,  which  we  are 
left  to  imagine  parted  to  let  the  erstwhile  bedridden  victim  of  sin  pass. 
Here  Jesus  not  merely  prevented  but  removed  the  slowly  developing 
pathological  results  of  a  sin  as  if  he  were  remitting  a  penalty,  thus 
interfering  with  the  normal  moral  order  of  life.  If  the  disease  was  of 
syphilitic  origin  he  created  a  fiat  immunity  as  lord  of  bacteria,  thus 
outdoing  Beelzebub,  the  god  of  flies.  Jesus,  all  agree,  came  to  redeem 
the  world  from  sin  and  provide  a  way  of  remission,  ransom,  and  atone- 
ment, so  that  having  sinned,  a  man  may  again  be  restored  to  righteous- 
ness and  purity  and  escape  the  otherwise  inevitable  punishment.  The 
world,  it  was  assumed,  was  under  a  curse,  which  Jesus  makes  void  by 
providing  a  way  of  escape.  This  is  the  chief  theme  of  Paul,  but  the 
effects  of  this  salvation,  although  inwardly  so  transforming,  become 
chiefly  apparent  in  the  next  hfe.  This  metamorphosis  of  regeneration 
needed  to  be  figured  and  objectively  demonstrated  ad  oados  by  a 


6i4  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

salient  and  ostensive  instance,  and  also  to  be  made  more  manifest  by 
appearing  instantaneously.  How  could  even  a  modern  symbolist 
devise  a  more  apt,  striking,  and  portable  fable  of  the  new  life?  for  we 
are  now  very  near  the  focus  of  the  Christian  consciousness.  If  it  was 
progressive  paralysis  or  paresis,  an  incurable  germ  disease  of  which 
only  a  fatal  termination  can  be  prognosticated,  Jesus  here  not  only 
suspended  but  reversed  the  law  of  cause  and  effect  and  wrought  the 
only  cure  of  this  disease  in  the  New  Testament.  The  implication  that, 
if  he  can  forgive  sinful  acts  that  bring  disease,  he  can  far  more  easily 
and  on  the  instant  efface  the  bodily  ravages  of  the  infectious  bacilli 
and  toxins,  is  obvious,  for  are  not  all  the  hundreds  of  diseases  now  listed 
the  results  of  sin,  either  personal  or  ancestral?  His  Kingdom  is  that  of 
Hygeia,  morally  and  therefore  physiologically  perfect.  He  is  thus  doc- 
umented as  the  Divine  Biologos,  in  whose  presence  lethal  agencies  are 
obviated.  The  very  word  "health"  means  wholeness  or  holiness,  and 
all  morbific  agencies  must  flee  if  his  attention  is  once  focussed  on  them. 
In  the  Kingdom  all  sickness  is  driven  away,  and  the  fond  dream- 
wish  of  the  folk-soul  to  be  completely  and  superlatively  well  is  realized 
in  a  way  beyond  the  wildest  dreams  of  modern  Christian  Science. 

The  Withered  Hand. — The  three  witnesses  again  tell  of  the  man 
with  the  withered  hand  in  the  synagogue  on  the  Sabbath.  Knowing 
that  he  was  watched  to  see  whether  he  would  heal  him  on  the  holy  day, 
Jesus  made  the  patient  stand  forth  and  asked  the  people  whether  one 
should  not  hft  a  sheep  out  of  a  pit  and  save  Hfe  rather  than  kill,  do 
good  rather  than  evil,  on  that  day.  There  was  no  answer.  Then  at 
his  command  the  man  stretched  forth  his  hand  and  it  was  whole  like 
the  other.  The  Pharisees  then  took  counsel  how  to  destroy  him,  not 
for  healing  but  for  doing  so  on  the  Sabbath,  so  strict  were  their  laws 
and  customs  on  this  point. 

This  miracle  is  less  striking  than  its  Old  Testament  precedent. 
Jeroboam  stretched  out  his  hand  against  EHjah,  and  it  stiffened  so  he 
could  not  draw  it  back  till,  at  the  prophet's  prayer,  this  penal  miracle 
was  set  aside  by  a  second  miracle  of  grace.  We  are  not  told  whether 
the  cure  meant  power  to  move  the  hand,  or  whether  instantaneous 
restoration  of  the  atrophy  was  involved.  The  latter  would  mean 
that  the  shrivelled  member  grew  suddenly  in  size,  weight,  and  fulness, 
as  well  as  came  under  the  power  of  the  will.  Such  growth  would 
involve  regeneration  of  tissues  and  might  make  this  in  a  certain  sense 


THE  MIRACLES  615 

analogous  to  the  miracle  of  the  multiplication  of  loaves.  If  the  afflic- 
tion was  merely  hy steroid,  the  cure  has  abundant  parallels  and  was 
no  miracle  but  an  unusual  restoration  misinterpreted.  But,  if  instead 
of  being  sprain,  rheumatism,  or  inflammation,  all  of  which  have  been 
suggested,  it  was  unilateral  wasting  with  atony  or  contractures  involv- 
ing both  cerebral  and  trophic  nerves  and  gradually  bones,  after  a  long 
train  of  symptoms  according  to  modern  pathology,^  then  this  instan- 
taneous reversal  of  a  long  train  of  degenerate  and  necrotic  processes 
was  a  Httle  like  resuscitation,  not  of  the  whole  body  but  of  the  limb  only. 
The  more  we  know  of  the  nature  of  this  disease  the  more  impossible  is 
it  to  conceive  any  such  cure. 

Dropsy. — Again,  in  the  house  of  a  chief  Pharisee  was  a  man  with 
dropsy;  and  again  Jesus,  knowing  he  was  watched,  asked  if  it  was  lawful 
to  heal  on  the  Sabbath,  and  repeated  the  query,  if  an  ox  or  ass  fall  into  a 
pit  should  he  not  be  rescued  on  the  Sabbath?  But  there  was  no  answer. 
So  Jesus  healed  his  patient  and  let  him  go.  This  trouble  was  in  some 
sense  the  reverse  of  atrophy.  There  are,  however,  practically  the 
same  objections  and  the  same  defense,  and  the  difficulties  and  possi- 
biUties  of  the  two  cases  are  analogous. 

The  Epileptic  at  the  Synagogue. — In  another  Sabbath  healing  (like 
the  above,  in  Luke  only),  a  woman  who  had  been  bowed  (some  think 
a  hunchback)  for  eighteen  years  was  healed  by  imposition  of  hands  and 
pronouncing  her  cured,  and  she  became  at  once  straight  and  glorified 
God.  The  ruler  of  the  synagogue  protested  that  there  were  six  other 
days  in  the  week,  in  any  of  which  cures  should  be  done  rather  than  on 
this  day.  Jesus  replied  calling  him  a  hypocrite  because  he  who  would 
water  his  own  stalled  cattle  on  the  Sabbath  was  less  kind  to  his  fellow- 
man.  Much  more  should  a  daughter  of  Abraham,  bound  by  Satan,  be 
loosed.    At  this  Jesus'  enemies  were  ashamed,  while  the  people  rejoiced. 

The  Pool  of  Bethesda. — John  (v:i-i6)  caps  the  climax  in  this  series 
of  miracles.  The  scene  is  briUiant,  at  the  pool  of  Bethesda  (to  the  exist- 
ence of  which  scholars  find  no  other  contemporary  allusion,  and  which 
may  be  a  purely  imaginary  place) .  Here  it  was  not  only  on  the  Sabbath 
but  in  Jerusalem  and  at  a  feast.  It  seems  to  have  been  a  kind  of  hospital- 
theatre  with  five  halls  (which  some  think  analogous  to  the  five  Books  of 
Moses),  full  of  patients  with  diverse  diseases.  An  angel  occasionally 
troubled  the  waters  (as  geysers  spout  and  bubbles  often  arise  periodically 


■Osier:  "Principle  »nd  Practice  of  Medicine."    sth  ed.,  p.  9»8  et  seq. 


6x6  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

from  mineral  and  aerified  springs),  and  whoever  stepped  into  the  water 
first,  after  one  of  these  visitations,  was  healed,  whatever  his  disease.  It 
was,  therefore,  a  very  popular  curatorium  in  which  the  heaUng  seemed 
to  come  directly  from  heaven.  Here  Jesus  found  a  man  infirm,  not  for 
eighteen  but  for  thirty-eight  years  (the  same  number  of  years  in  which 
the  children  of  Israel  wandered  in  the  desert).  As  he  lay  there  Jesus 
asked  him  the  superfluous  question  "Wilt  thou  be  made  whole?"  and 
was  answered  that  when  the  waters  moved  there  was  no  one  to  put 
him  in,  and  others  stepped  down  before  him.  Jesus  commanded  him 
to  arise,  take  up  his  bed,  and  walk,  which  he  straightway  did,  when 
Jesus  quietly  left  the  multitude.  The  Jews  told  the  patient  that  he 
had  violated  the  Sabbath  law  in  carrying  his  bed,  and  he  defended 
himself  by  saying  that  the  healer  commanded  it.  Asked  who  had  cured 
him,  the  deponent  repUed  that  he  knew  not.  But  Jesus  met  him  later 
in  the  temple  and  commanded  him  to  sin  no  more  lest  a  worse  thing 
befall  him.  Then  he  knew  it  was  Jesus,  and  so  informed  the  Jews, 
who  sought  to  slay  him  because  he  had  healed  on  the  Sabbath,  although 
the  angel  who  troubled  the  waters  was  doing  so. 

Working  on  the  Sabbath  to  John  seems  to  symbolize  the  never- 
resting  activity  of  his  Logos-Christ.  The  defense  for  so  doing  in  his 
miracle  is  drawn  from  the  bucolic  exigencies  of  pastoral  life.  Even  a 
citation  of  David  eating  the  shewbread  of  the  temple,  which  was  set 
apart  for  the  priests,  is  not  quite  in  point,  but  what  is  shown  forth 
is  the  incessant  creative,  regenerative,  divine  power.  Thus  John's 
story  of  the  cure  of  a  bedridden  man  is,  like  his  narrative  of  the  blind 
man  and  the  raising  of  Lazarus,  the  superlative  instance  of  the  series, 
but  this  has  the  most  gorgeous  scene-setting  of  any  miracle  of  Jesus. 
The  latter  now  and  here  triumphantly  demonstrated  his  abihty  to  give 
strength  to  the  weak. 

If  the  therapy  of  the  agitated  water  be  interpreted  as  a  natural 
tonic  bath,  Jesus  here  shows  his  vis  creatrix  to  be  vastly  superior  to 
that  of  nature,  and,  if  it  was  the  work  of  an  angel,  superior  to  his. 
By  dramatically  selecting  one  patient  from  the  large  number  and 
signalizing  his  case  by  an  immediate  and  complete  cure,  he  must  have 
excited  jealousy  and  envy  in  the  other  visitors  at  this  spa.  If  he  had 
merely  enabled  him  to  enter  the  pool  he  would  have  in  a  sense  seemed 
ancillary  to  a  superior  healing  power,  and  we  should  have  had  here  two 
miracles  instead  of  one. 


THE  MIRACLES  617 

The  meaning  which  this  crude  fable  embodies,  and  which  is  the 
soul  that  has  kept  its  body  with  all  its  grotesqueness  and  deformity 
alive,  is  the  precious  symbolization  of  the  truth  that  with  God  we  are 
strong,  and  without  or  against  him  we  are  impotent.  Iniquity  saps 
strength,  weakens  will,  while  righteousness  breaks  the  bands  of  sin,  rein- 
forces volition,  and  gives  a  strength  not  our  own.  With  the  divine  powers 
we  can  become  energumens  so  potent  that  by  comparison  our 
former  strength,  though  normal,  would  seem  weakness.  Free  will  is 
hobbled  by  inhibitions  and  repressions  like  an  athlete  threatened  with 
abulia.  Here  Jesus  is  made  the  emancipator  of  the  shackled  will, 
and  puts  "I  can"  in  place  of  "I  cannot,"  closes  the  chasm  between 
desiring  and  accomplishing  wherein  so  many  lives  are  wrecked,  re- 
stores lost  control  over  the  voluntary  muscles  and  body  movements; 
for,  as  Pindar  says,  only  strong  muscles  can  make  men  and  nations 
great  and  free.  Strong  himself  from  his  vocation,  Jesus  wanted  his 
followers  to  be  so,  but  they  must  be  athletes  of  the  new  and  higher  life, 
capable  of  forming,  holding,  and  executing  the  great  purposes  of  the 
Kingdom.  Strength  always  had  and  always  will  have  its  votaries,  its 
heroes,  its  thrillmg  incidents,  and  its  religion,  and  cannot  be  fitly 
served  by  weaklings,  for  only  the  power  of  the  normal  will  makes  us 
complete  men.  These  cures  thus  are  only  ancient  fossils  of  what  we 
now  call  the  gospel  of  efficiency,  and  therefore  they  will  long  remain 
precious  things  in  the  reliquary  of  orthodoxy  because  there  will  always 
be  those  who  have  suffered  arrest  on  the  lowest  rungs  of  the  ladder 
that  leads  from  sense  up  to  spiritual  comprehension.  Thus  men  may 
be  endowed  with  power  from  on  high  that  makes  the  weak  mighty,  the 
feeble  strong.  Every  lesson  emanating  from  Jesus  teaches  man's 
higher  power,  now  of  insight,  as  in  the  blindness  cures;  now  of  vitality, 
as  in  the  Resurrection  narratives;  here  of  ability  to  do.  We  are  all  as- 
thenic, or  living  far  below  our  maximum  output  of  energy.  The  moral 
here  is  of  works,  not  of  knowledge.  Ethically  we  are  all  lame,  crippled, 
paralytic,  bound  by  Satan.  We  would  be  more  chaste  in  thought  and 
life,  more  temperate,  enterprising,  industrious  and  less  idle  or  lazy, 
more  altruistic  and  less  selfish,  more  mindful  of  the  supreme  ends  of  life 
unless  distracted  by  irrelevancies  and  details.  Such  are  the  sermons  in 
these  fossil  stones. 

Possession. — Possession  was  to  a  great  extent  a  new  idea  among  the 
Jews  in  Jesus'  day,  and  there  are  relatively  few  traces  of  it  in  the  Old 


6i8  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

Testament.  It  had,  however,  developed  rapidly  under  the  influenco 
of  Babylon  and  the  Parsee  dualism,  as  Azel,  Ahriman,  Asmodeus,  and 
demons  that  bring  disease,  pain,  terrify,  and  enter  living  men  and 
animals.  Exorcism,  however,  though  a  recent  importation  into  Judea 
from  the  East,  was  preformed  and  rooted  in  the  old  pre-Semitic  Akka- 
dian consciousness.  Beelzebub's  minions  especially  seize,  tear,  strangle 
men,  make  them  cry  out,  roll,  foam;  and  seven,  or  even  a  legion,  may 
take  up  their  abode  in  the  same  person,  although,  Hausrath  thinks,  only 
successively.  If  expelled  they  must  wander  to  and  fro,  enter  into 
unclean  beasts,  haunt  tombs  or  deserts,  or  else  return  to  their  gloomy 
abode  in  the  nether  world.  Although  they  cling  with  great  tenacity 
to  their  human  abode,  they  do  not  spare,  but  strain  and  wrench,  and 
may  destroy  it.  It  is  they  who  make  men  blind,  deaf,  dumb,  deformed, 
or  may  indwell  with  no  external  manifestations  save  bad  conduct. 
Jesus  doubtless  held  this  view,  and  did  not  merely  accommodate  to  it, 
as  Schenkel  said.^  Jesus  undoubtedly  believed  himself  in  such  cases 
to  be  face  to  face  with  Satan's  house,  and  that  the  spoliation  of  it 
meant  so  much  more  ground  won  for  the  Kingdom  of  God,  and  held 
that  every  such  cure  advanced  the  day  when  Satan  would  himself  be 
bound.  Yahveh  and  Satan  were  fighting  face  to  face  with  the  human 
soul  as  their  battle-ground.  Jesus'  cures  in  general  differed  from  those 
of  his  disciples  and  of  the  Church  later  in  that  he  discarded  washing, 
fasting,  fumigation,  ceremonial  methods  of  dispossession.  He  needed 
no  consecrated  oil  nor  water,  no  incantation,  music,  magic  stones, 
formulae,  binding,  nor  any  other  of  the  methods  of  the  Jewish  exorcists 
which  Josephus  enumerates.  Some  of  the  healing  miracles  of  this 
class  we  can  now  accept,  while  others  once  thought  marvellous  can 
hardly  seem  so  to  us.  The  evil  spirits  regarded  Jesus'  very  proximity 
as  the  harbinger  of  their  expulsion.    They  often  knew  him  from  afar 

'Even  in  our  own  day  exorcism  seems  to  be  sometimes  effective  as  a  psychotherapeutic  method.  See,  e.  g.,  "The 
Treatment  of  Insanity  by  Exorcism,"  by  Dr.  G.  Williams,  London,  1908;  also  "Body  and  Soul,"  by  P.  Dearmer,  New 
York,  1909,  4i6  p.  Here  also  one  might  consult  the  records  of  Emmanuelism  in  this  country,  as  briefly  stated  in  Weaver's 
book,  "Mind  and  Health,"  New  York,  1913,  500  p.  For  the  much  further  developed  scientific  applications  of  psycho- 
therapy there  is  not  only  the  literature  of  the  Freud  school,  but  see  more  specifically  J.  J.  Dejerine  and  E.  Gauckler's 
"Les  manifestations  fonctionnelles  des  psychon^vroses;  leur  traitement  par  la  psychoth^rapie,"  Paris,  Masson,  1911, 
561  p.;  Paul  Dubois,  "The  Psychic  Treatment  of  Nervous  Disorders,"  Trans,  and  ed.  by  S.  E.  Jelliffe  and  W.  A.  White, 
New  York,  Funk  &  Wagnalls  Co.,  1905,  466  p.;  and  J.  Marcinowski,  "Der  Mut  zu  sich  Selbst;  das  Seelenleben  des 
Nervosen  und  seine  Heilung,"  Berlin,  Salle,  1914,  400  p.  See  also  Rosenbach's  Works.  These  methods  are  now  multi- 
form, and  besides  the  records  of  them  in  the  memorabilia  of  the  synoptists  there  are  twenty  more  records  of  marvellous 
healings  in  Acts,  and  a  long  list  of  them  in  the  early  Church  from  Justin  the  Martyr  (d.  163  a.  d.)  to  Sozomonus  (d.  450 
A.  n.).  Dearmer  traces  the  record  from  St.  John  of  Beverley,  781,  to  Father  John  of  Kronstadt,  1908,  and  has  much 
to  tell  us  of  places  like  Lourdes,  Holywell,  etc.,  urging  that  stigmatism  is  natural,  etc.  The  method  has  fallen  into  disuse 
because  it  was  thought  to  be  miraculous,  although  in  fact  it  is  in  no  sense  so,  but  many  of  the  cures  are  genuine,  natural, 
permanent.  A  number  of  regular  physicians  who  do  not  themselves  believe  in  prayer  advise  it  to  their  religious  patients, 
e.  g.,  as  a  soothing  and  sleep-bringing  agency,  and  a  building  has  even  been  recommended  where  methods  of  exorcism 
could  be  made  impressive,  to  which  certain  patients  would  be  likely  to  respond.  Should  some  such  scheme  prove  even 
more  effective  than  its  advocates  hope,  it  would  hardly  surprise  the  pychogeneticist  who  realizes  how  strongly  man's 
past  still  grips  his  unconscious  life.  If  a  patient  thinks  he  has  a  devil,  perhaps  the  physician  might  with  profit  humour 
Eis  illusion  a!ad  call  to  the  devil  as  if  he  were  real,  to  come  out  of  him. 


THE  MIRACLES  619 

and  entreated  him  not  to  molest  them.  He  suffered  them  not  to  speak, 
sind  his  procedure  was  probably  more  effective  because  it  was  simple. 
The  fame  he  early  acquired,  his  magnetism,  poise,  confidence,  author- 
ity, manner,  broke  mental  fetters,  stimulated  dormant  selfhood,  aroused 
healthful  reaction,  gave  new  and  supplanting  thoughts,  freed  the 
enslaved  imagination,  broke  the  power  of  fixed  ideas,  changed  the 
current  of  diseased  wills,  and  made  him  a  master  in  this  field  of  moral 
psychotherapy  from  whom,  with  our  conceptions  of  the  fatalistic  domi- 
nance of  somatic  and  also  hereditary  influences,  we  have  still  much  to 
learn.  Despite  all  the  diversities  and  credulity  of  the  recorders,  Jesus' 
achievements  in  this  domain  are  one  of  his  chief  trophies  and  most 
potent  suggestions  to  the  world,  and  there  is  something  here  which  the 
most  inexorable  criticism  must  leave  essentially  intact.  These  mys- 
terious cures  in  his  day  excited  more  wonder  and  awe  than  anything 
else  he  did  or  said,  and  were  one  of  the  chief  causes  of  the  envy  of  the 
Pharisees.  It  was  this  class  of  which  the  early  Church  boasted,  which 
had  much  to  do  with  its  spread,  and  which  involved  a  kind  of  intensity 
of  soul  emitted  by  the  energumens  of  the  Church.  They  would  also 
give  him  inomense  repute  and  authority  over  the  world  of  souls  in 
general,  and  would  inconceivably  reinforce  all  his  nterpretations  of  all 
things  of  the  soul.  They  documented  him,  too,  as  one  to  whom  the 
devils  did  homage,  so  that  thus  he  has  a  message  perhaps  not  yet  en- 
tirely appropriated  by  the  Church  or  by  modem  medicine.  He  stands 
for  the  salvation  of  the  body  as  for  that  of  the  soul,  and  would  doubtless 
have  understood  something  of  our  own  theories  of  the  undersoul  and  of 
the  efficiency  of  relics,  pilgrimages,  and  shrines. 

First  on  this  hst  comes  the  doubly  recorded  and  very  characteristic 
second  miracle  of  heaUng,  with  a  most  dramatic  setting.  Jesus  taught 
or  preached  with  great  power  one  Sabbath  in  the  synagogue.  The 
congregation  mars^elled  both  at  his  doctrine  and  at  his  original  auto- 
didactic  way  of  setting  it  forth.  Although  we  have  no  intimation  of 
the  theme  of  his  discourse,  he  evidently  did  not  give  a  mere  exegesis  of 
even  the  greatest  of  the  prophets  but,  though  he  may  have  cited  them, 
spoke  on  his  own  authority  as  if  independently  commissioned  by 
Yahveh,  and  even  went  distinctively  beyond  the  greatest  of  his  prede- 
cessors. Perhaps  this  was  his  very  first  setting  forth  of  his  new-found 
insights  and  attitude  to  the  universe,  and  the  first  fresh,  condensed, 
germinal  expression  of  his  new  conviction  which  was  set  forth  more 


620  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

fully  in  his  later  words  and  deeds.  Would  that  the  world  had  some 
record  of  this  utterance!  The  authoritativeness  with  which  he  seems 
to  have  spoken  may  have  been  a  little  intemperate  or  brash,  like  the 
extravagant  zeal  of  a  new  convert.  "  It  hath  been  said  by  this  or  that 
prophet,  priest,  or  king  of  high  degree  of  old,  but  I  say  unto  you  thus 
and  so,"  as  if  very  obviously  he  felt  himself  to  be  greatest  of  all;  and 
yet  the  worshippers  seem  to  have  been  spellbound,  awed,  and  delighted. 
When  he  had  finished,  or  perhaps  in  the  very  midst  of  his  sermon,  an 
excitable  epileptic  became  unable  longer  to  contain  himself.  Accept- 
ing the  belief  that  his  own  attacks  were  the  invasion  of  a  Satanic 
personahty,  as  all  others,  Jesus  included,  did,  he  cried  out  in  propria 
persona  diaboli  and  as  representing  all  his  fellow  evil  spirits  from  the  pit, 
"Let  us  alone,  do  not  destroy  us,  we  know  thou  art  the  Christ,  the  holy 
one  of  God."  This  made  a  thrilling,  significant,  and  utterly  unex- 
pected situation.  The  devil  had  erstwhile  sought  in  vain  to  tempt 
Jesus.  Now  his  minions  openly  recognized  and  acknowledged  him, 
and  still  more  significantly,  they  were  the  very  first  to  do  so.  It  was 
now  open  war  between  the  Divine  and  the  powers  of  darkness.  The 
two  supreme  potencies  that  in  the  Persian-tinged  dualism  of  that  day 
and  land  were  always  arrayed  in  strife,  one  against  the  other,  were  now 
face  to  face,  each  knowing  its  adversary.  In  the  cry  of  the  demoniac 
there  was  also  a  note  of  fear  and  dismay,  even  more  than  of  defiance, 
as  if  the  demons  were  reminiscent  of  the  long-ago  expulsion  from 
heaven  of  the  cohorts  of  Satan,  and  as  if  now  they  feared  eviction  from 
the  domain  of  earth,  which  had  hitherto  been  freely  allowed  to  them. 
Jesus  and  all  his  friends  and  acquaintances  doubtless  believed  that  at 
this  crucial  moment  he  stood  face  to  face  with  a  representative  of  the 
great  enemy.  Here  and  now  the  war  between  the  two  kingdoms  was 
joined,  a  warfare  still  hotly  waged  and  unconcluded.  This  type  of 
insanity  is  very  generally  thought  to  be  the  devil's  inspiration,  the 
diametrical  opposite  and  counterpart  of  that  brought  by  the  Holy 
Ghost.  The  theopneustic  man  stands  over  against  the  diabolo- 
pneustic  Convidsionnaire,  a  Httle  as  if  the  contestants  represented,  one 
all  the  celestial  and  the  other  all  the  infernal  agencies  in  the  world. 
The  type  of  the  victim's  attack  seems  to  have  been  ideally  fitted  for  the 
kind  of  clinical  demonstration  dramatically  needed.  There  was  first  a 
coherent  and  purposive  exclamation  involving  full  recognition  of  the 
Divine  Phvsician,  as  if  the  Christhood  of  Jesus  had  been  convincingly 


THE  MIRACLES  621 

demonstrated  to  an  insightful  mind  in  which,  at  the  onset  of  the  aura, 
the  attack  took  the  form  of  extreme  if  not  clairvoyant  lucidity.  Per- 
haps in  his  normal  state  the  patient  had  been  instructed  and  possibly 
expectant,  and  the  sudden  impulse  to  cry  out  even  in  such  an  environ- 
ment, when  it  became  overmastering,  was  recognized  as  a  warning 
that  the  convulsion  was  coming.  Jesus  showed  no  trace  of  the  pro- 
found inner  satisfaction  which  later  was  so  apparent  when  Peter  recog- 
nized his  Christhood,  but  commanded  that  the  unclean  spirit  hold  his 
peace,  as  if  he  shrank  from  being  recognized  publicly  and  proclaimed 
for  what  he  was  and  for  what  he  had  come  to  know  himself  to  be. 
Then  he  ordered  the  demon  to  come  out  of  the  man,  which  it  did  only 
after  he  had  cried  out  and  fallen  in  convulsions.  The  fit  had  spent  its 
force,  and  the  patient  doubtless  lay  quiet,  limp,  and  comatose  in  the 
characteristic  post-epileptic  state.  The  awe  and  fame  of  this  power  to 
command  devils  shows  that  those  present  thought  this  a  miraculous 
cure.  The  record  itself,  however,  as  it  stands,  asserts  no  psychotherapy 
of  any  kind.  While  Jesus'  preaching  may  have  precipitated  the  attack 
by  its  incitement  and  tension,  the  latter  would  normally  have  ended 
as  it  did  if  Jesus  had  said  nothing  or  even  been  absent.  Jesus  seems  to 
have  thought  his  intervention  cured  a  veritable  case,  and  thereby  ac- 
quired faith  and  courage  to  try  to  heal  other  cases.  But  the  only  real 
cure  would  have  been  the  prevention  of  other  attacks  of  the  same  type, 
and  whether  this  occurred  we  are  not  told.  Hence  it  is  all  very  un- 
satisfactory. When  we  remember  that  the  insane  were  not  sequestered 
in  those  days,  the  incident  was  natural,  and  the  form  as  it  is  narrated 
is  quite  consonant  with  what  we  know  both  of  the  prevalent  ideas  of 
madness  as  possession  and  of  the  course  of  Jacksonian  epilepsy,  which 
begins  in  the  higher  and  proceeds  downward  to  lower  level  centres. 
It  is  evident  that  Mark  and  Luke  thought  this  cure  a  miraculous 
one,  but  accepting  all  they  say  there  is  no  indication  that  any  cure 
occurred. 

The  Demoniac. — The  healing  of  the  demoniac  in  far-off  heathen 
Gadara  gives  us  a  lurid  glimpse  of  the  demonology  of  that  day,  and  is  wild 
and  weird  to  a  degree  that  suggests  Walpurgis-night  or  the  Witches'  Sab- 
bath. It  has  been  called  the  master-  or  show-piece  of  all  mind-cure  tales. 
Nevertheless  it  is  recorded  in  all  three  of  the  synoptics  and  with  fewer 
discrepancies  than  in  some  of  the  other  thrice-told  tales.  On  landing 
uDon  these  unknown  shores  Jesus  was  met  by  a  wild  man  (we  will 


623  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

assume  one  with  Mark  and  Luke,  and  not  two  men  as  with  Matthew) 
coming  out  of  the  tombs,  naked  and  so  untamable  that  he  broke  all 
fetters,  and  even  chains,  wandering  day  and  night,  crying  out  in  the 
mountainous  desert  and  caves,  mutilating  himself  with  stones.  Seeing 
Jesus  from  afar  he  ran  toward  and  fell  down  before  him  in  adoration 
and  shrieked,  "What  have  I  to  do  with  thee,  Jesus,  thou  Son  of  God, 
most  high?  I  adjure  thee  by  God  not  to  torment  me.  Send  me 
not  away  out  of  the  country."  When  asked  his  name,  he  answered 
"Legion"  (the  name  of  a  corps  of  the  army  of  the  hated  Romans, 
numbering  from  four  thousand  five  hundred  to  six  thousand  men  be- 
sides cavalry),  so  many  devils  were  in  him.  Thus  Jesus  alone  now 
faced  the  cohorts  of  hell,  which  recognized  him  on  the  instant  and  from 
afar  for  all  that  he  thought  himself  to  be,  and  begged  abjectly  for 
mercy  at  his  hands.  Strong  as  the  demons  in  him  had  made  this  man, 
he  grovelled  at  Jesus'  feet  and  implored  him  not  to  inflict  torture  or  to 
banish  him;  and  Jesus  granted  the  patient's  prayer.  On  the  desolate 
highlands  skirting  the  lake  was  a  herd  of  swine  which  some  estimate 
at  not  less  than  two  thousand  in  number,  animals  abhorred  by  the 
Jews  and  suggestive  of  all  gentile  abominations;  and  so,  instead  of 
sending  the  demons  directly  to  the  abyss,  Jesus  transferred  them  into 
the  swine,  whereupon  the  latter,  as  if  seized  by  a  sudden  and  uncon- 
trollable panic,  such  as  more  gregarious  animals  are  more  prone  to, 
stampeded  and  tore  wildly  down  the  precipitate  bank  and  perished  in 
the  sea,  beneath  which  the  Hebrew  traditions  thought  lay  the  way  to 
Sheol  or  the  inferno.  By  this  therapeutic  prodigy  the  possessed  man 
was  cured,  clothed  himself,  and  desired  to  follow  Jesus,  but  was  told 
instead  to  proclaim  his  cure  to  the  people  of  his  own  race  who  had 
known  him.  The  swine-herds  had  spread  the  news  of  what  was  done 
and  how,  and  the  people  gathered  among  them,  probably  the  owners  of 
the  swine,  which  Woolston  estimates  worth  at  least  four  thousand 
dollars.  But  so  alarmed  were  all  that,  instead  of  demanding  recom- 
pense they  besought  Jesus  to  depart,  and  he  did  so. 

Mitigators  of  the  miraculous  have  outdone  themselves  in  suggest- 
ing modifications  of  the  record  as  it  stands.  We  have  been  told  that 
the  swine  were  semiferal  and  were  probably  frightened  by  the  cries  and 
gestures  of  the  lunatic,  and  that  the  latter  was  shocked  into  sanity  by 
realizing  the  calamity  that  he  had  caused.  Others  have  puzzled  to 
make  the  number  of  devils  in  the  patient  equal  to  the  number  of  swine. 


THE  MIRACLES  623 

Others  have  thought  the  souls  of  Jesus'  companions,  tense  in  this  new 
unknown  country  of  ill  repute,  probably  interpreted  the  incoherent 
and  perhaps  inarticulate  cries  of  a  madman  as  the  acknowledgment  of 
Jesus'  di\inity,  or  that  the  presence  of  these  strangers  brought  on  an 
epileptic  fit  which  caused  the  man  to  fall  with  a  cry  and  to  recover 
normally.  Some  said  that  had  it  ever  entered  into  the  heart  of  Jesus 
while  Hving  to  suspect  such  an  interpretation  as  the  synoptists  here 
made  of  some  natural  event,  he  would  have  protested  and  despaired 
of  them.  Our  narrative  as  it  stands  is  perhaps  an  interesting  illustra- 
tion of  the  way  in  which  excited  minds  saturated  with  the  folklore  of 
that  day  might  react  to  a  series  of  perfectly  natural,  if  to  them  unusual, 
events.  Pierquin  in  "Traite  de  folic  des  animaux,"  and  many  others 
since  have  shown  how  liable  half-wild  flocks  of  various  animals  are  to 
sudden  alarms.  Others,  accepting  this  weird  welter  of  wonders,  so 
strangely  felted  together,  at  its  face  value,  praise  Jesus'  noblesse  oblige 
by  which  he  seemed  in  a  truly  gentlemanly  way  to  grant  the  wish  of 
the  troop  of  demons,  and  then  after  strategically  impounding  them  in 
these  porcine  bodies,  stampeding  them  back  to  the  Hades  whence  they 
came.  It  was  thus  in  miracle  plays  that  God,  Christ,  angels,  and  even 
saints  always  outwitted  the  devil  and  all  his  imps.  Lange  and  Krabbe 
think  that  in  this  coup  Jesus  did  have  the  aid  of  angels  who  influence 
certain  animals,  and  add  that  here  Jesus  penetrated  farthest  into 
heathendom  and  overcame  a  whole  pantheon  of  demons  preparatory 
to  assaiUng  Satan  in  his  own  stronghold  later.  Neander  thinks  that 
if  Jesus  ventured  among  the  rude  Gadarenes  this  narrative  was  coloured 
to  cover  a  report  from  it  after  some  unknown  bucoHc  or  pastoral 
incident,  or  else  that  he  unwittingly  destroyed  property  and  was 
forced  to  retire,  or  that  the  story  as  we  have  it  may  be  a  satire  made  by 
the  owners  of  the  swine  to  retaliate  by  sarcasm  for  their  loss.  Keim 
says  it  should  teach  moderation  to  those  who  are  shocked  at  any  scruple 
about  any  miracle,  and  that  it  should  be  a  kind  of  memento  mori 
against  extreme  credulity,  for  it  cannot  possibly  be  accepted  by  a  sound 
mind,  at  least  without  involving  a  belief  in  demonology  far  cruder  than 
any  form  of  modern  spiritism.  The  superstitious  believer  must  hold 
that  demons  can  indwell  in  animals  as  well  as  in  man,  and  that  these 
fool  demons  destroyed  the  very  bodies  that  they  had  just  prayed  to 
enter,  and  went  straight  to  the  place  from  which  they  had  wished  to 
be  saved.    It  seems  to  involve  a  belief  in  malign  disembodied  spirits 


624  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

that  may  wander  in  waste  places,  and  in  psychic  personalities  that  can  be 
transferred,  as  ancient  savage  diseases  could  be  conjured,  from  human 
to  animal  or  even  inanimate  bodies.  Souls  must  be  interchangeable, 
therefore,  to  a  high  decree.  These  old  soul  extractors  and  exchangers 
were  wont  to  convince  their  patients  and  bystanders  that  the  princi- 
ple extracted  had  really  left  them  and  gone  into  something  else  by  mak- 
ing it  seem  to  spill  water,  upset  furniture,  shake  a  tree  or  flower,  make 
an  animal  cry  out,  as  a  sign  that  the  evicted  soul  had  entered  it  and  left 
its  former  host.  Thus  it  is  said  that  we  have  only  to  invert  the  order 
of  events  to  see  that  the  panic  of  the  swine  gave  Jesus  an  opportunity 
which  he  used  by  a  flash  of  inspiration  to  convince  his  patient  that  the 
devils  had  really  left  him,  and  that  the  epileptic  accepted  the  sugges- 
tion. It  was  a  clever  and  impromptu  therapeutic  device  which  proved 
to  have  the  pragmatic  sanction  of  working  well.  To  accept  this  view 
we  need  only  to  change  the  order  of  two  events,  and  this  we  may  do  on 
the  doctrine  of  the  " timelessness  of  supernatural  events"  or  by  as- 
suming that  the  inspiration  of  the  Holy  Ghost  in  the  writers  was  so 
plenary  and  coercive  that  they  lost  all  sense  of  time  and  sequence,  being 
swallowed  up  in  Bergson's  duree  reelle,  the  modern  euphemism  for  the 
old  theological  eternity,  and  so  became  mere  "human  pens"  writing 
automatically  as  autistic  or  planchette  writers  do  now  without  knowing 
what  they  say. 

AUegorization.— The  allegorists  have  not  been  very  successful  with 
the  Gadara  incident.  The  theory  that  the  demons  are  heathen  gods, 
who  are  here  expelled  by  being  allowed  to  follow  their  own  elective  affinity 
and  thus  reveal  their  true  character,  by  going  to  the  most  unclean  of  all 
beasts,  is  one  favourite  interpretation  of  this  kind.  The  rejection  of  the 
cured  patient  who  desired  to  enter  the  circle  of  Jesus,  and  the  demand  to 
state  and  proclaim  his  cure  among  his  own  people,  prefigures  the  esta- 
bhshment  of  an  apostolate  among  the  heathen  races.  The  chains  he  broke 
were  those  of  Hebrew  legation,  custom,  form.  His  pre-prompt  recognition 
of  Jesus  as  the  Son  of  God  foreshadows  the  fact  that  gentiles  led  in  the 
acceptance  and  promulgation  of  Christianity.  We  have  here,  too,  the 
most  striking  of  all  conversions  from  the  complete  dominion  under 
Satan's  kingdom  to  the  Kingdom  of  God,  compared  to  which  that  of 
Paul  himself  was  less  sudden  or  transforming.  Thus,  too,  all  swine 
who  cannot  appreciate  Gospel  pearls,  and  would  rend  those  who  present 
them,  are  to  be  offered  up  as  a  hecatomb  to  Satan.    Thus  this  first 


THE  MIRACLES  625 

promulgation  of  Jesus  to  the  gentile  world  is  marked  by  a  terrific 
slaughter  of  the  agents  of  uncleanness. 

John  says  nothing  of  casting  out  devils,  as  if  this  odious  super- 
stition were  already  on  the  wane;  and  this  is  one  argument  to  show  that 
John  wrote  late.  Such  events,  too,  do  not  comport  with  the  logos 
nature  of  Jesus  as  held  by  John.  Still,  exorcism  had  become  so  com- 
mon in  the  second  century  that  it  was  of  no  value  as  a  proof  of  super- 
natural power  in  those  who  practised  it.  Paul  does  not  enumerate 
this  power  among  the  gifts  of  the  Spirit,  and  in  the  Johannin  circle  this 
practice  had  probably  fallen  into  ill  repute.  Strauss  even  sees  here 
the  beginning  of  a  healthful  skepticism  directed  toward  the  grosser 
forms  of  miracle  working,  and  infers  that  this  kind  of  higher  criticism 
had  begun  before  the  completion  of  our  New  Testament  canon. 

Leprosy. — This  disease  was  so  malignant  and  incurable,  and  also 
so  dreadful  from  the  seclusion  that  became  necessary  to  prevent  infec- 
tion, that  it  was  commonly  thought  to  be  a  specific  divine  punishment. 
A  leper  colony  even  to-day  is  too  horrible  for  uncensored  description. 
The  disease  was  perhaps  more  common  than  we  know  in  ancient  Israel. 
It  appeared  in  Job,  and  Moses  was  taught  both  to  cause  and  to  cure 
it  in  his  own  land,  to  accredit  himself  with  the  people  as  if  by  a  kind 
of  trick  in  collusion  with  Yahveh.  His  sister  Miriam  was  smitten 
with  it  as  a  punishment  for  her  contumacy.  Elisha  cured  the  Syrian 
captain  Naaman  by  prescribing  seven  immersions  in  the  Jordan.  It 
seems  generally  to  have  been  placed  under  a  hygienic  ban  as  especially 
unclean. 

One  of  the  earliest  miracles  ascribed  to  Jesus  and  thrice  told  is 
the  miracle  of  healing  a  leper  who  came,  knelt,  besought,  and  expressed 
faith.  Jesus  had  compassion,  touched  him,  and  commanded  him  to  be 
clean,  and  he  was  so.  He  was  then  charged  to  tell  no  one,  but  to  go  to 
the  priests,  as  the  hygienic  laws  required,  and  have  his  cure  certified 
and  promulgated  so  that  the  restrictions  upon  his  Hfe  could  be  removed. 
Whether  he  did  so  and  was  duly  inspected  we  are  not  told,  but  he 
violated  the  behest  of  silence,  and  blazoned  his  cure  abroad  to  such 
an  extent  that  Jesus  had  to  withdraw  to  the  desert  to  pray. 

This  cure  staggers  faith.  Of  course  the  correctness  of  the  diag- 
nosis has  often  been  called  in  question.  Some  opined  that  a  sudden 
upgush  of  faith  in  the  patient  made  him  feel  cured,  so  that  he  fancied 
he  detected  in  himself  signs  of  sudden  convalescence,  although  ofiicial 


626  jESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

attestation  that  his  condition  was  improved  is  lacking.  Perhaps,  al- 
though this  is  not  mentioned,  he  bathed  like  Naaman,  and  was  and 
appeared  cleaner.  Others  think  Jesus  and  his  disciples  were  so  sure 
he  could  heal  that  they  assumed  without  scrutiny  that  the  cure  had 
actually  occurred,  when  in  fact  it  had  taken  place  only  in  their  imagina- 
tions. Others  have  suggested  a  case  of  what  is  now  known  as  anaes- 
thetic or  nervous  leprosy  with  its  alternating  train  of  symptoms. 

Luke  (only)  tells  the  story  of  ten  lepers  just  outside  a  village, 
who  stood  at  the  distance  prescribed  by  law  and  cried  out  for  mercy. 
Without  touching,  Jesus  commanded  them  to  go  and  show  themselves 
to  the  priests,  and  on  the  way  they  were  cleansed  of  this  disease.  A 
few  critics  have  thought  this  a  variation  of  the  former  case  despite  the 
fact  that  here  ten  instead  of  one  are  cured,  but  the  sequel  gives  it 
an  individual  character,  for  nine  who  were  cleansed  proceeded  on  their 
way,  while  only  one,  a  Samaritan,  returned  and  effusively  thanked  his 
curer.  Remarking  unfavourably  upon  the  nine  who  had  not  glorified 
God,  Jesus  dismissed  the  grateful  one,  declaring  that  faith  had  made  him 
whole.  Thus  Naaman,  also  a  stranger,  had  been  cured.  Jesus  said 
that  in  Elisha's  day  there  were  many  lepers  in  Israel,  but  only  this 
one  had  been  cured.  This  instance  has  to  many  suggested  the  parable 
of  the  good  Samaritan  stranger  who  was  the  only  one  of  three  to  be  a 
"neighbour"  to  the  man  who  fell  among  thieves.  To  credit  the  com- 
plete, literal,  instant,  and  wholesale  cure  of  this  dread  disease  is  im- 
possible save  for  those  whose  minds  are  leprous  with  ignorance  and 
superstition.  Perhaps  one  of  its  lessons  is  that  if  such  are  cleansed  it 
is  their  duty  without  ostentatious  proclamation  to  show  themselves 
to  their  spiritual  advisers,  who  should  then  pubHcly  proclaim  them 
clean. 

Leprosy  was  thought  to  be  a  filth  disease,  and  was  common  from 
the  earliest  times  not  only  in  Egypt  but  in  India,  China,  and  most 
parts  of  Asia.  So  it  was  the  fittest  of  all  symbols  of  the  corruption  of 
sin  which  could  be  washed  away  by  the  cleansing  water  of  baptism. 
Some  think  it  especially  typifies  secret  personal  vice.  Its  slow  but  sure 
progress,  and  its  repulsiveness  which  makes  it  a  body  of  living  death, 
best  showed  what  Yahveh  thought  of  iniquity.  John,  instead  of  giving 
us  the  last  and  greatest  wonder  as  he  does  in  other  series,  says  nothing 
of  cures  from  this  disease,  some  think  because  he  was  preoccupied 
in  his  Semitic  way  with  what  Plato  called  the  beautiful  and  good,  and 


THE  MIRACLES  627 

was  averse  to  facing  the  harmatological  aspects  of  life  in  their  ugliness 
and  deformity.  The  synoptic  stories  are  the  merest  sketches,  vulner- 
able on  every  side  to  criticism,  so  that  there  was  abundant  room  for  a 
characteristically  Johannin  culminating  cure.  But  John  seems  to 
have  felt  the  leprous  nature  of  sin  far  less  than  Paul;  for  the  former 
seems  to  have  been  born  good  and  to  have  had  less  knowledge  of  sin 
in  his  own  experience,  approaching,  as  is  often  remarked,  the  impec- 
cability of  Jesus  himself.  He  had  rare  power  of  intuition,  while  Paul 
became  good  by  a  great  conversion  and  laboriously  reasoned  out  his 
insights.  Modern  medicine  would  probably  select  another  disease  as 
best  illustrating  the  effects  of  individual  and  hereditary  sin,  and  several 
such  have  been  suggested,  but  even  yet  leprosy  has  more  currency  and 
popular  efficacy.  The  idea  of  those  exegetes  was  that  Jesus  was  him- 
self an  antitoxin  or  specific  against,  or  panacea  to  cure,  all  illnesses, 
inaugurating  a  new  psychic  life  so  intense  that  it  sloughed  off  all  in- 
firmities, even  the  most  deep-seated  and  offensive.  Had  man  been 
sinless  he  would  never  have  been  ill,  we  are  told,  and  we  never  hear  of 
sickness  among  his  followers,  as  if  they  were  immunized  by  his  faith. 
The  cases  of  leprosy  originated  in  sin  and  have  established  the  usage  of 
the  most  expressive  of  all  the  metaphors  of  sin,  under  the  curse  of 
which  the  unregenerate  world  is  a  leper  colony  to  which  Christianity 
comes  with  a  miraculous  sudden  and  complete  specific  which  not  merely 
checks  the  progress  of  the  disease  but  restores  the  degeneration  of  tissue 
that  it  has  caused.  Thus  we  are  here  in  the  field  of  rhetoric  or  heur- 
istics in  the  large  Aristotelian  sense,  rather  than  in  the  domain  of  his- 
torical fact. 

Malchus^s  Ear. — ^Luke  only  tells  of  the  healing  of  Malchus,  the 
servant  of  the  high  priest  whose  right  ear  was  "cut  off"  when  Jesus 
was  arrested.  He  tells  us  that  he  "touched  his  ear  and  healed  him." 
We  are  not  told  whether  the  entire  external  ear  or  a  portion  of  it  was 
smitten  off,  nor  do  we  know  whether  we  are  to  infer  that  Jesus  merely 
staunched  the  blood  or  replaced  a  severed  member  which  grew  back  by 
intussusception,  or  caused  a  new  ear  to  grow.  The  incident  is  not  men- 
tioned elsewhere.  It  shows  how  ready  Luke  was  to  draw  on  the  faith 
and  credulity  of  his  readers  without  detail  or  circumstance,  and  also 
has  a  certain  significance  as  an  index  of  his  own  state  of  mind.  That 
Jesus  paused  to  remedy  this  injury  at  a  critical  moment  in  his  career 
seems  at  the  same  time  a  rebuke  to  Peter,  who,  we  are  elsewhere  told, 


628  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

inflicted  the  blow  and  whom  he  also  verbally  reprimanded.  It  may 
have  been  an  act  of  sympathy  evoked  by  the  mutilation,  or  done  by 
way  of  placation  to  avoid  precipitating  a  more  serious  conflict  between 
his  followers  and  those  who  came  to  take  him  into  custody.  But  the 
casual  way  in  which  the  incident  is  tossed  off  suggests  a  power  of  faith 
on  Luke's  part  that  was  capable  of  believing  that  on  some  more  serious 
occasion  Jesus  would  not  have  been  unable  to  restore  Malchus's  head 
had  it  been  severed  and  had  restoration  been  necessary  for  his  pur- 
poses. It  was  a  wild,  somewhat  comical,  and  half  cowardly  act  on 
Peter's  part,  and  a  really  and  wisely  valorous  man  would  have  attacked 
not  a  servant  but  the  leader  of  the  troop,  or  especially  Iscariot  himself, 
against  whom  vindictive  retaliation  might  have  been  more  fitly  di- 
rected. It  is  a  strange  anticlimax,  too,  that  this  should  have  been  rep- 
resented as  the  last  of  all  Jesus'  miracles.  This  is  the  only  cure  of 
trauma,  and  while  it  might  conceivably  be  invested  with  symbolic 
significance,  there  is  no  indication  that  it  ever  had  the  sHghtest. 

(B )  Resurrections. — (a)  The  raising  of  the  twelve-year-old  daughter 
of  the  archon  Jairus  is  attested  by  the  three  synoptists.  As  she  lay  at  the 
point  of  death  the  father  came  and  requested  healing,  but  on  returning 
to  the  house  they  were  told  she  was  dead.  Jesus  insisted  that  she  was 
not  dead  but  sleeping,  and  with  three  disciples  and  perhaps  the  parents 
went  in  where  she  lay,  took  her  by  the  hand,  and  called  upon  her  to 
arise.  This  she  straightway  did  and  walked,  when  Jesus  commanded 
that  food  be  given  her,  and  charged  secrecy  which  was,  of  course,  im- 
possible. The  funeral  piping  suggests  that  the  friends  beheved  her 
dead.  Only  children  such  as  she  are  often  feeble,  and  her  age,  to  say 
nothing  of  the  woman  healed  on  the  way  of  the  twelve  years'  issue  of 
blood,  suggests  first  menstruation.  Modern  literature  abounds  with 
death-like  trances  and  swoons  at  this  epoch.  One  need  not  be  credu- 
lous toward  modern  mind-cures  in  order  to  see  that  this  narrative 
might  be  a  veracious  account  of  a  rare  but  by  no  means  supernatural 
event.  It  seems,  however,  to  be  attracted  into  a  striking  paralleUsm 
with  the  story  of  Elijah  raising  the  son  of  the  widow  of  Sarepta.  In  the 
one  case  it  is  a  son,  in  the  other  a  daughter;  here  the  father,  there  the 
mother  intercedes;  in  the  one  case  a  staff  is  laid  upon  the  body,  and 
in  the  other,  hands.  In  both  cases  the  saver  came  from  a  journey  and 
strangers  are  excluded.  The  prophet  laboured  longer,  and  the  resus- 
citation he  effected  was  more  gradual,  for  we  are  told  that  the  lad  first 


THE  MIRACLES  629 

sneezed  and  then  opened  his  eyes.  Both  are  only  children,  and  the 
parents  of  both  come  with  faith.  ^  By  these  paralleHsms  Jesus  is  made 
to  legitimate  himself  as  a  prophet  and  challenge  comparison  with  the 
greatest  one  of  old. 

Luke  alone  reports  the  resurrection  of  the  youth  oj  Nain.  Here  the 
body  was  met  on  the  way  to  burial,  which  among  the  Jews  was  very 
soon  after  Hfe  went  out.  This  account  is  but  Httle  ampHfied.  Jesus 
touched  the  bier,  called  the  young  man  to  arise,  which  he  did  and  began 
to  speak.  As  the  narrative  stands,  death  in  this  case  is  more  probable 
although  revival  from  a  swoon  is  not  entirely  excluded.  The  stages  of 
restoration  were  passed  immediately.  But  why  was  such  an  event 
unknown  or  unmentioned  by  the  other  Evangelists?  Here,  too,  is  an 
Old  Testament  parallel.  The  widow's  son  dies  in  the  presence  of  EU- 
jah,  who  carries  him  to  an  upper  room,  stretches  himself  upon  the 
body,  and  prays  that  the  youth's  soul  may  return.  This  famous  an- 
cient miracle  was  performed  only  half  a  league  from  Nain,  and  the 
geographical  and  circumstantial  nearness  is  at  least  suggestive.  The 
Jewish  belief  that  the  soul  hovered  about  the  body  for  some  time,  and 
the  absence  of  tests  of  the  complete  extinction  of  life,  should  also  be 
given  due  weight.  The  balance  of  probabilities  in  every  mind  that  is  at 
once  candid  and  inteUigent  cannot  long  remain  in  doubt,  without  in- 
voking the  cheap  assumption  of  Paulus,  that  in  this  case  and  that  of 
Jairus's  daughter  Jesus  by  his  medical  experience  was  able  to  perceive 
signs  of  hfe  unnoticed  by  others.  The  candid  psychologist  cannot  fail 
to  admit  that  we  do  not  yet  know  very  definitely  how  far  the  gradual 
processes  of  natural  death  may  go  and  yet  be  reversed  by  the  intense 
faith  and  love  of  a  circle  of  friends  using  extreme  methods  of  recall. 
Very  many  well-attested  cases  might  be  cited  of  suspended  animation 
and  of  those  who  have  hved  after  being  snatched  from  the  jaws  of 
death.  Allowing  only  human  fallibiUty  of  judgment  on  the  part  of 
both  bystanders  and  writers,  the  still-unexplored  limits  of  nature  may 
not  have  been  transcended  in  either  of  the  above  cases.  Jesus  may 
have  acquired  exceptional  insight  into  the  stages  by  which  life  passes 
over  into  death,  and  in  certain  cases  he  may  have  achieved  resuscita- 
tion at  a  degree  of  ex-animation  still  unreached  by  our  methods. 
At  any  rate,  the  tendencies  of  modern  psychological  progress  suggest 
some  impending  advance  in  both  knowledge  and  practice  in  this 

>Kdm,  "History  of  Jmus  of  Narara."    Vol  4,  p.  i-jy 


630  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

direction,  and  medical  science  may  by  natural  means  ere  long  accom- 
plish somewhat  more  than  is  even  yet  generally  thought  possible. 

In  these  two  cases  of  resuscitation  of  adolescents  it  may  seem  at 
first  sight  symboUsm  run  wild  to  suggest  an  allusion  to  the  well-under- 
stood fact  that  this  age  is  itself  one  of  regeneration,  the  saHent  traits 
of  which  are  the  outburst  of  physical  growth,  the  beginning  of  love, 
by  which  Hfe  normally  passes  over  from  egoism  to  altruism,  the  awak- 
ening of  the  intellect,  the  new  orientation  to  adulthood,  and  the  fact 
that  this  everywhere  is  the  age  of  conversion,  confirmation,  or  initiation 
into  the  tribe,  and  also  the  period  of  new  HabiUties  to  arrest  or  retarda- 
tion of  the  subsequent  stages  of  development,  which  are  so  precious  yet 
so  precarious.^  The  tout  ensemble  of  these  changes,  the  new  tempta- 
tions and  the  new  dangers,  and  the  successful  overcoming  of  them  all 
might  well  be  typified  here;  but  this  would  be  too  cryptic  and  recondite. 
The  discrepancies  in  the  first  narrative  are  so  great  that  some  think 
there  were  two  girls  healed  at  different  times.  Again,  all  three  ac- 
covnts  strangely  insert  very  near  the  middle  of  the  narrative,  as  Jesus 
was  on  the  way  to  heal  the  twelve-year-old  girl,  the  case  of  the  woman 
with  the  twelve-year  issue  of  blood.  The  placing  of  this  latter  event 
on  the  way  to  the  bedside  of  the  dead  or  dying  girl  is  hardly  sufi&cient 
excuse  for  injecting  it  into  the  narrative  in  the  way  in  which  all  the 
synoptists  do  it.  Indeed,  the  question  is  inevitable  whether  the 
association  of  death  or  the  death-like  swoon  at  the  age  of  first  menstrua- 
tion showing  phenomena  that  suggest  aborted  molimena,  with  a  case 
of  menorrhagia  or  excess,  does  not  imply  a  more  inner  relation  between 
the  two.  It  at  least  suggests  the  question  whether  the  first  cure  may 
have  consisted  in  the  inauguration  of  the  first  monthly  period.  If  so, 
we  have  a  veiled  intimation  that  here  Jesus  is  made  to  control  the  lunar 
phenomena  of  womankind  and  thus  to  appear  in  a  new  way  as  Lord 
of  the  very  gates  of  life.  As  Yahveh  of  old  made  wombs  barren  or 
fertile,  so  here  Jesus  stands  forth  as  the  normalizer  of  the  function 
by  which  was  fulfilled  the  old  covenant  with  Abraham,  whereby  if  he 
kept  the  Lord's  law  and  word  his  seed  should  be  multiplied  like  the 
uncounted  stars.  On  this  eugenic  view  Jesus  is  made  Lord  of  the  un- 
born as  well  as  of  children  and  youth.  He  controls  the  entrance  to  as 
well  as  the  exit  from  life.  In  this  so  evidently  belaboured  and  dispar- 
ately  told  story,  and  the  baflOdng  and  unparalleled  incorporation  of  a 

>See  my  "Adolescence."    New  York,  1904, 1  vol*. 


THE  MIRACLES  631 

healing  into  the  midst  of  a  resurrection  story,  we  may  thus  have  before 
us  an  attempt  to  establish  Jesus  as  the  controller  of  excessive  or  defective 
functioning  of  sex  in  women.  The  feeling  that  virtue  had  gone  out  of 
him  in  staunching  the  bloody  flux  has  often  been  called  suggestive,  but 
no  commentator  that  I  can  find  has  ever  attempted  to  tell  of  what. 
It  probably  refers  to  the  mysterious  healing  power  that  emanated  from 
Jesus'  body  working  independently  of  his  will,  and  perhaps  coming 
directly  from  the  Father.  Few,  if  any,  miracles  make  so  strong  an 
impression  that  there  is  behind  something  untold  and  utterly  inaccessi- 
ble, however  much  it  may  challenge  conjecture.  The  writers  seem  de- 
sirous of  expressing  something  which  they  could  not  express,  either 
from  lack  of  insight  into  a  tradition  which  had  already  taken  a  certain 
form  and  to  which  they  felt  loyal  and  could  not  omit,  or  else  because 
they  saw  in  it  some  meaning  that  needed  to  be  veiled  for  a  larger  and 
less  esoteric  public,  on  a  tabooed  topic  on  which  they  were  liable  to 
speak  too  plainly.  So  they  adopted  this  method  of  inserting  one  ac- 
count into  another,  hoping  that  to  the  wise,  at  least,  the  hidden  mean- 
ings would  seep  through  while  they  imposed  upon  themselves  a  strict 
censorship.  A  large  body  of  new  knowledge  to-day  shows  the  recip- 
rocal control  each  by  the  other  of  all  psychoneural  phenomena  and  the 
vita  sexualis.  The  son  of  the  widow  of  Nain  was  also  an  only  child, 
like  the  daughter  of  Jairus.  Thus  Luke's  mother-son  narrative 
exactly  complements  that  of  the  father-daughter  pair  in  the  synoptists. 
The  latter,  too,  is  dead  by  added  tokens;  which  suggests  either  subse- 
quent accommodation  or  else  that  there  was  a  number  of  such  cases 
from  the  abundance  of  which  the  writer  could  select  one  that  was  ex- 
traordinarily fitted  for  this  purpose. 

(b)  The  raising  of  Lazarus  (John  only)  is  as  it  stands  the  most 
stupendous  and  confounding  of  all  miracles,  more  so  in  some  respects 
than  even  the  Resurrection  of  Jesus  himself;  for  in  the  latter  case  there 
was  no  putrefaction,  and  there  were  also  no  witnesses  and  no  details 
of  just  how  it  occurred.  Sincerely  as  Jesus  loved  Lazarus  and  his  sis- 
ters, when  the  latter  sent  him  word  of  their  brother's  illness,  he  quietly 
remained  where  he  was  two  days,  with  no  intimation  of  any  special 
duties,  but  remarked  to  those  about  him  that  the  sickness  was  not 
unto  death,  although  the  sequel  shows  that  it  was,  and  although  he 
later  told  his  disciples  that  Lazarus  was  not  asleep  but  really  dead. 
Only  when  Thomas,  overwhelmed  with  pathos,  exhorted  the  disciples 


632  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

to  go  to  Bethany  and  die  with  the  friend  they  all  seemed  to  love  so  ar- 
dently, did  Jesus  consent  to  start  for  the  afflicted  home.  Why  did  the 
Johannin  or  Logos-Christ  delay?  He  explained  this  later  by  saying  that 
he  was  glad  he  was  not  present  at  the  death,  in  order  that  they  might 
have  occasion  to  believe  that  it  had  all  occurred  for  the  glory  of  God 
and  his  Son.  The  object  of  the  delay  thus  seems  to  have  been  to  give 
an  object-lesson  of  God's  power  to  raise  the  dead.  The  soul  was 
supposed  in  that  day  to  leave  a  corpse  on  the  end  of  the  third  day, 
and  then  the  body  was  given  over  to  corruption.  So  Jesus  waited  four 
days,  until  as  Martha  said  the  body  stank,  a  delay  that  from  the  human 
standpoint  seemed  inhuman,  all  the  more  so  if  Jesus  had  the  slightest 
doubt  of  his  success  in  raising  him  from  the  dead,  although  the  implica- 
tion is  obvious  that  his  confidence  in  his  power  to  do  this  was  absolute. 
The  mourning  friends  were  thus  compelled  to  endure  their  grief  for  the 
sake  of  the  great  demonstration  that  was  to  follow.  On  the  other  hand, 
Jesus  did  not  at  first  expect  a  fatal  issue  of  the  illness,  although  he  knew 
later,  apparently  telepathically,  that  Lazarus  was  dead,  and  then  was 
intent  upon  showing  that  what  seemed  so  conclusively  to  mortals  to 
be  death  was  really  only  sleep,  from  which  he  knew  how  to  awaken  those 
he  loved.  Thus,  while  he  lingered  in  Perea  his  higher  nature  knew  all 
the  while  what  was  to  occur,  and  he  stayed  just  long  enough  to  ma!:e 
the  miracle  most  impressive  and  dramatically  effective.  The  sisters 
upbraided  Jesus  for  his  delay,  saying  that  had  he  been  there  their 
brother  would  not  have  died.  They  seem  to  have  had  no  intimation 
that  his  assertion  that  their  brother  would  be  awakened  could  mean 
anything  but  at  the  resurrection  of  the  last  day.  When  Jesus  told 
Martha  that  he  was  the  resurrection  and  the  life,  and  whoever  believed 
in  him,  though  he  were  dead,  would  live,  and  added  that  whosoever 
believed  on  him  would  never  die,  she  does  not  seem  to  have  drawn  the 
inference  that  because  truly  dead  her  brother  had  not  believed.  When 
asked  if  she  accepted  all  this,  her  hope  seems  to  have  been  revived  but 
to  be  yet  held  in  abeyance,  so  that  she  only  answered  that  she  believed 
he  was  Christ,  the  Son  of  God,  and  then  hastened  off  to  call  her  sister 
Mary  to  be  present,  as  if  to  witness  some  great  impending  event  which 
at  least  might  be  possible.  When  Mary  came  with  a  large  group  of 
sympathizing  Jews,  like  a  Greek  chorus  or  like  the  mourners  and 
musicians  when  Jairus's  daughter  was  raised,  unlike  the  synoptic  Jesus, 
who  is  sympathetic  with  grief,  the  Logos-Christ  seems  vexed  that 


THE  MIRACLES  633 

any  one  should  weep  while  he,  the  very  principle  of  life,  is  present,  and 
also  because  he  had  been  reproached  for  not  being  present  and  thus 
permitting  the  death.  But  if  he  felt  anger  it  turned  at  once  to  grief, 
and  we  are  told  that  he  wept  as  he  is  never  said  elsewhere  to  have  done, 
save  in  view  of  Jerusalem  when  bemoaning  the  troubles  that  awaited 
her. 

The  sepulchre  before  which  all  now  stood  was  very  like  that  of 
Jesus  later,  hewn  out  of  a  rock  and  closed  with  a  stone,  while  the  grave- 
clothes  also  were  similar,  prefiguring  thus  Jesus'  own  Resurrection. 
At  his  command  the  stone  was  removed  despite  Martha's  protest 
that  after  four  days  the  corpse  would  be  offensive.  Then  Jesus  prayed, 
thanking  God  that  he  was  heard  as  always,  not  asking  power  to  do  this 
miracle,  but  as  if  feeling  that  he  already  had  virtually  done  it,  and 
apologizing  to  Yahveh  for  praying  at  all,  on  the  ground  that  he  did  so 
that  bystanders  might  know  that  he  was  the  Son  of  God,  and  perhaps 
to  lift  their  thoughts  to  him.  Critics  have  impugned  the  motivation 
of  this  prayer  as  mockery,  as  acting,  or  at  least  as  accommodation. 
The  synoptic  Christ  might  pray  for  power  as  Elijah  had  done  before 
restoring  the  dead,  but  the  Johannin  Christ  is  above  the  need  of  asking 
or  thanking,  because  his  whole  Hfe  is  an  effusion  of  God.  The  prayer 
is  thus  pedagogical,  to  show  his  oneness  with  the  Father.  As  Hilgen- 
feld  well  said,  we  have  in  this  record  traces  of  the  dualization  or  in- 
complete fusion  of  the  divine  and  human  nature.  After  this  Jesus  * '  cried 
with  a  loud  voice,  'Lazarus,  come  forth.'  And  he  that  was  dead  came 
forth,  bound  hand  and  foot  with  grave-clothes;  and  his  face  was  bound 
about  with  a  napkin.  Jesus  saith  unto  them,  'Loose  him  and  let  him 
go. '  "    With  this  dumbfounding  denouement  the  narrative  stops  short. 

The  natural  curiosity  to  know  Lazarus'  state  of  mind  and  his  sub- 
sequent experiences  after  his  reanimation,  whether  all  traces  of  the 
disease  that  caused  his  death  had  been  eliminated,  whether  he  was 
restored  at  once  to  his  maximum  of  health  and  strength,  and  how 
much  truth  there  is  in  the  persistent  tradition  that  the  family  suffered 
at  the  hands  of  the  Pharisees — all  this  is  not  gratified,  although  litera- 
ture has  repeatedly  sought  to  fill  the  void  in  our  knowledge  by  fantasy. 
It  used  to  be  said  that  Lazarus  had  not  confessed  Christ,  and  so  his 
soul  had  to  be  called  back  not  from  paradise  but  from  Hades,  and  that 
thus  he  had  the  only  opportunity  vouchsafed  to  any  mortal  to  accept 
Christ  after  some  experience  with  post-mortem  existence.    If  this  is 


634  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

so,  it  is  regrettable  that  we  are  not  told  explicitly  whether  he  really 
was  saved  at  last. 

This  is,  of  course,  the  miracle  of  miracles  and  the  most  staggering 
of  all  to  faith,  even  to  that  of  orthodoxy.  The  first  question  which 
naturally  arises  is  why  the  other  three  EvangeHsts  say  and  apparently 
know  nothing  of  it.  They  wrote  earlier,  and  there  was  every  reason 
why  they  should  have  chronicled  it  and  none  why  they  should  not; 
and  those  reasons  that  have  been  brought  forward  why  they  should  not 
are  of  little  or  no  weight.  It  has  been  conjectured,  e.  g.,  that  owing  to 
this  incident  persecution  had  caused  Lazarus'  family  and  friends  to 
move  to  parts  unknown,  and  that  this  miracle  had  dropped  out  of  the 
memory  of  the  circle  in  which  the  synoptists  moved  till  John  unearthed 
it.  But  surely  it  was  unique  and  too  famous  not  to  have  been  heard 
of  by  all  Jesus'  followers.  Others  have  said  that  the  synoptists  were 
not  apostles,  and  that  this  was  reserved  to  John  who  was.  But  there 
were  no  other  reservations;  on  the  contrary,  what  was  known  of  Jesus 
seems  to  have  been  used  by  each  writer  with  no  restrictions  save  those 
he  imposed  upon  himself.  Some  agreement  has  been  fancied  among 
the  apostles  by  which  this  fell  to  John,  but  the  other  dozen  miracles 
which  two  or  more  of  the  Gospels  have  in  common  make  this  improb- 
able. Some  have  had  recourse  to  the  view  that  it  was  not  really 
Lazarus'  body  but  his  ghost  in  ghostly  grave-clothes  that  appeared. 
But  this  would  severely  tax  the  credulity  of  all  who  doubt  the  existence 
of  ghosts,  and  it  distinctly  contravenes  the  spirit  of  the  narrative. 
The  much-overworked  hypothesis  of  suspended  animation  has  been 
adduced  despite  its  exclusion  by  the  statement  that  putrefaction  had 
begun.  Some  have  conjectured  that  the  first  Gospels  did  not  mention 
this  incident  because  it  might  injure  the  feelings,  or  imperil  even  the 
safety,  of  Mary  and  Martha,  and  interfere  with  their  effort  to  escape 
the  notoriety  it  had  brought  to  the  family  while  they  were  at  Bethany; 
or  again  it  has  been  urged  that  the  first  synoptists  desired  to  magnify 
the  Galilean  career  of  Jesus,  and  were  jealous  of  deeds  done,  as  this 
was,  in  Judea.  In  the  more  Uberal  camp,  too,  we  find  a  great  variety 
of  theories.  Renan,  e.  g.,  conjectures  that  Lazarus  had  been  ill, 
but  was  better.  His  sisters,  who  were  intensely  sympathetic  with 
Jesus,  knew  that  the  latter  was  near  the  most  depressing  period  of  his 
career,  since  his  role  of  Messiah  was  making  increasing  claims  upon 
him  which  he  was  more  and  more  unable  to  meet,  until  the  distress 


THE  MIRACLES  635 

from  this  cause  finally  drove  him  to  accept  death  as  a  welcome  relief, 
because  the  part  of  Messiah  had  become  intolerable.  Fearing  some 
tragic  result  from  this  extreme  depression  in  which  Jesus  now  was, 
these  well-meaning  sisters  hit  upon  a  ruse  in  fulfilment  of  which 
Lazarus,  now  recovered  but  still  pale  and  weak  from  his  illness,  allowed 
himself  just  before  Jesus'  arrival  to  be  wrapped  in  a  winding  sheet  and 
shut  up  in  the  family  tomb,  to  which  Martha  conducted  Jesus  im- 
mediately upon  his  arrival  because  he  desired  to  see  him.  She,  who 
represents  the  Petrine  executive  as  her  sister  Mary  does  the  Johannin 
contemplative  type,  had  gathered  a  crowd,  and  Jesus  then  called  upon 
Lazarus,  upon  which  he  came  forth.  Thus  not  only  the  people,  but 
very  probably  Je^us,  thought  this  was  a  miracle,  and  Jesus,  if  he  sus- 
pected any  deception  about  it,  did  not  betray  his  friends,  either  because 
he  was  so  sad  and  weary  that  he  had  grown  a  little  indifferent  for  the 
moment,  or  because  he  may  have  sought  to  console  himself  with  the 
forlorn  hope  that  possibly  he  had  raised  the  dead  without  intending  to 
do  so.  Others,  also,  such  as  Saints  Bernard  and  Francis  d'Assisi,  were 
unable  to  check  the  passion  for  miracles  among  their  friends,  and  so 
they  were  almost  coerced  into  the  role  of  miracle-workers,  perhaps 
despite  ineffective  protests.  This  view  of  course  compels  us  to 
sacrifice  either  the  truth  of  John's  account  or  else  the  sagacity  and 
common  sense,  if  not  the  honour,  of  Jesus. 

Many  exegetes  think  to  mitigate  some  one  or  other  single  feature 
of  the  record,  making  concessions  of  detail  to  save  the  rest;  and  others, 
assuming  some  unknown  incident  as  a  nucleus,  admit  some  degree 
of  distortion  or  exaggeration.  Protestants  have  from  Luther  down 
found  this  the  most  troublesome  of  all  things  in  the  story  of  Jesus* 
Ufe,  unconsciously  assuming,  perhaps,  that,  as  Spinoza  said  in  sub- 
stance of  himself,  if  they  once  accepted  this  marvel  literally  they  would 
be  compelled  to  accept  Jesus  as  superman,  even  if  they  knew  nothing 
else  about  him.  Ever>'  other  claim  of  Christianity  would  be  easy  if 
this  were  once  accepted.  Some  have  advised  that  here  reason  be  held 
in  abeyance  to  a  credo  quia  absurdum  or  abandonment  to  faith,  and 
would  make  this  the  cardinal  shibboleth  or  orthodoxy.  In  this  they 
are  right,  for  a  creduKty  that  can  accept  this  will  stick  at  nothing. 

The  rationahstic  school  reminds  us  that  the  only  evidence  that 
decomposition  had  set  in  was  Martha's  opinion,  and  that  she  was  prob- 
ably mistaken.    Paulus  thought  that  Lazarus  was  in  a  comatose  state, 


636  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

or  lethargy,  from  which  he  was  awakened  by  the  opening  of  the  tomb, 
which  let  in  Hght  and  warm  air,  and  calls  attention  to  the  fact  that 
Jesus  merely  commanded  him  to  come  forth  and  not  to  awake  from  the 
dead.  It  has  also  been  suggested  that  Jesus'  keen  sight  perceived  sHght 
movements  in  the  corpse  that  others  did  not  notice.  Gabler,  assuming 
Lazarus  had  really  died,  says  Jesus  had  very  good  reason  for  saying  he 
was  glad  he  was  not  present,  because  if  he  allowed  any  one,  especially 
a  friend  of  his,  to  die  in  his  presence,  he  would  lose  Messianic  prestige. 
If  we  were  to  grant  either  of  the  above  suppositions,  Jesus  is  made  an 
actor,  and  his  moral  character  is  sacrificed.  The  excision  of  difficult 
passages  as  interpolations  has  also  been  attempted  by  various  critics, 
notably  Deffenbach.  Luke  conjectures  that  Jesus'  delays  were 
excused  by  the  fact  that  he  was  having  a  great  revivalistic  success  in 
his  ministry  in  Perea  and  therefore,  especially  as  he  was  instinctively 
averse  to  miracle-working,  felt  himself  bound  to  remain  where  he  was. 
Jesus  was  also  predominantly  a  teacher  in  that  he  deliberately  pro- 
posed to  let  Lazarus  die  and  then  resuscitate  him  rather  than  to  heal 
him  before  his  death,  because  this  would  have  a  better  pedagogic 
object-lesson  effect  on  Lazarus'  friends  and  others,  although  in  no 
other  case  does  he  try  to  increase  his  miracles. 

But  surely  the  time  has  long  since  come  when  it  can  and  must  be 
said  that  beUef  in  this  miracle  taken  literally  is  a  psychological  impos- 
sibility for  any  intelligent  modern  soul.  This  is  a  case  where  the  will 
to  believe  cannot  compel  belief  itself.  The  Kalif  Omar,  the  dearest 
friend  of  the  great  prophet  of  Mohammedanism,  after  he  had  just 
seen  his  master  die,  stepped  to  the  door  of  the  tent  with  drawn  sword, 
affirming  that  the  prophet  still  lived  and  threatening  death  to  any  one 
who  dared  to  deny  it,  because  he  felt  the  pragmatic  sanction  that  it  was 
expedient  for  the  people  to  think  him  yet  alive.  Thus  Jove  was  said 
to  have  recourse  to  his  thunderbolts  when  he  knew  he  was  in  the 
wrong.  Thus  too,  psychoanalysis  explains  how  men  can  vociferate 
most  those  things  they  wish  to  make  themselves  beUeve  but  cannot, 
and  may  even  persecute  those  who  confess  the  doubts  which  they  them- 
selves more  or  less  unconsciously  feel.  Thus  one  active  and  vital 
Church  to-day  sends  out  as  missionaries  those  young  men  who  have  just 
begun  to  doubt  its  creed,  and  finds  that  by  a  few  years  of  trying  to 
convmce  others  they  have  stifled  their  own  doubts.  Thus,  and  in 
many  other  ways,  reason  may  be  silenced  and  depressed  where  it  can- 


THE  MIRACLES  637 

not  be  immolated.    To  avow  faith  in  such  a  miracle  as  this  is  a  con- 
fession of  ignorance  of  what  true  sincerity  and  conviction  are. 

Not  only  has  this  narrative  become  an  offense  to  the  modern 
Christian  consciousness  which  causes  rejection  of  the  whole  Christian 
scheme  by  ingenuous  youth  who  have  been  taught  that  it  is  integral 
and  that  all  the  rest  falls  if  this  does,  but  returns  which  we  have  col- 
lected from  many  orthodox  Christians  show  that  this  miracle  has  either 
quietly  lapsed  into  insignificance  and  has  come  to  be  ignored  as  if  it 
were  encapsulated  like  a  foreign  body  in  the  soul,  or  else  it  lies  heavily 
on  the  conscience  as  a  positive  handicap  to  both  faith  and  works. 
Assemblages  of  Protestant  clergymen  confess  that  they  rarely  preach 
about  it,  save  incidentally  as  a  symbol,  and  Schleiermacher  said  it  was 
really  of  little  significance,  even  for  spiritual  edification.  Those  who 
think  they  believe  it,  or  try  to,  do  so  with  reservations  of  which  they 
may  not  be  aware.  The  very  soreness  and  touchiness  of  orthodoxy  con- 
cerning it,  and  its  readiness  to  turn  loose  the  awful  odium  theologicum 
upon  those  who  openly  question  it,  is  of  itself  a  conclusive  proof  of  the 
official  and  precarious  tenure  with  which  it  is  still  clung  to  in  the 
ultra-conservative  camp.  This  state  of  mind  is  not  unlike  that  of 
neurotics.  A  young  woman,  e.  g.,  worn  out  by  the  petulance  of  an 
incurably  morbid  mother,  half  realized  one  day  that  she  perhaps  really 
wished  her  parent  were  dead.  She  was  so  horrified  by  the  recognition 
of  this  motive  submerged  in  herself  that  it  led  her  to  redouble  all  her 
careful  assiduities  and  protestations  of  love  for  her  mother,  while  she 
became  morbidly  timid  lest  others  should  suspect  her  awful  death- 
thought,  which  she  was  trying  to  strangle  down  by  over-compensation. 
An  upright  man  was  surprised  by  a  temptation  which  in  an  unguarded 
and  relaxed  moment  suddenly  sprang  upon  and  nearly  overcame  him, 
and  thereafter  he  made  himself  a  paragon  of  the  countervailing  virtues. 
Kant's  theory  that  beUef  in  God,  soul,  and  immortality  work  well,  and 
although  unprovable  to  the  pure  theoretical  are  true  to  the  practical 
reason,  led  to  modern  pragmatism  that  makes  the  effects  on  conduct 
the  criterion  of  truth,  as  James,  Schiller,  and  better  yet,  Vaihinger 
(in  his  "  Philosophic  des  Als  Ob  ")  have  explained  in  great  detail.  But 
even  granting  that  faith  in  Lazarus'  miracle  worked  pedagogically 
well  in  the  early  stages  of  Christianity,  by  this  very  test  to-day  this 
miracle  must  be  utterly  discredited.  It  has  become  a  stone  of  stum- 
bling and  a  rock  of  offense  and  should  be  sloughed  off  as  a  caput  mortuum 


638  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

or  death's  head  at  every  symposium  of  Christian  experience.  Nor  is  it 
enough  to  allow  it  to  lapse  into  innocuous  desuetude.  As  every  en- 
lightened man  has  seen  who  has  had  any  experience  in  meeting  the 
doubts  of  earnest,  honest,  truth-seeking  young  men  over  this,  once 
this  handicap  is  dispelled  there  is  a  regeneration  of  loyalty  to  Jesus' 
person  and  a  reinforced  zest  to  penetrate  to  the  inner  meaning  of  his 
positive  teaching  to  our  age;  but  mere  negations  like  the  above  will  not 
suffice  to  accomplish  this  emancipation.  We  must  understand  the 
motivation  of  the  fabrication,  and  at  least  indicate,  though  we  cannot 
here  do  so  in  great  detail,  why  it  has  come  to  occupy  its  present  though 
false  position  in  the  conservative  Christian  consciousness.  This  may 
be  roughly  stated  as  follows,  premising  only  that  in  doing  so  we  enter 
a  field  of  both  individual  and  folk-psychology  that  is  still  more  or  less 
strange,  if  not  yet  finally  explored  by  expert  students. 

The  first  and  strongest  impression  which  Jesus  left  on  his  followers 
after  his  departure  from  the  world  consisted  in  their  conviction  that  he 
had  arisen  from  the  dead  and  thereby  conquered  the  king  of  terrors. 
For  the  early  Christians,  fear  of  death  was  changed  into  exaltation,  if 
not  often  into  longing.  His  Resurrection  was  Paul's  cardinal  theme, 
without  which  he  said  all  faith  was  vain.  Inebriation  with  this  con- 
viction and  all  it  implied  was  the  chief  cause  of  the  ecstatic  phenomena 
of  Pentecost  when  the  Holy  Spirit  was  given,  the  chief  mission  of 
which  was  to  give  faith  in  the  Resurrection.  The  great  death-killer 
had  brought  life  and  immortality  to  Hght,  and  it  was  because  he  had 
arisen  that  all  the  lingering  doubts  of  the  disciples  as  to  his  nature  and 
mission  were  finally  dispelled.  Belief  in  the  Resurrection  was  the 
chief  test  in  the  acceptance  of  new  converts.  Jesus'  teachings  as  well 
as  all  the  incidents  of  his  life  paled  relatively  to  this  submission  to  and 
subsequent  conquest  of  death.  This  tremendous  transforming  con- 
viction in  both  its  form  and  degree  was  a  new  thing  in  the  world,  and 
for  decades  and  even  generations,  it  brought  into  and  kept  the  early 
promulgators  and  their  converts  in  a  state  somewhat  predisposed  to 
ecstasy.  This  was  augmented  by  the  tribulations  and  persecutions 
to  which  the  early  Church  was  subjected.  What  was  more  natural, 
therefore,  than  that  the  immediate  successors  of  Jesus  should  develop 
apperception  centres  keenly  attuned  to  everything  in  Jesus'  life  and 
work  that  pertained  to  his  death-quelling  function  and  power?  This, 
too,  was  the  chief  focus  of  doubt,  and  by  far  the  most  vulnerable  point 


THE  MIRACLES  639 

of  attack  by  those  who  rejected  or  questioned  the  message  of  the  Gospel. 
There  was  in  believers  a  strong  determining  tendency  to  lay  stress 
on  all  that  made  for  and  to  ignore  all  that  made  against  this  prime 
article  of  faith,  and  to  require  a  Stellungsnahme  to  it  from  all  prose- 
lytes. Even  the  synoptic  Gospels  did  not  escape  this  tendency  to 
stress  and  exaggerate  the  details  of  the  two  resurrections  which  they 
ascribe  to  Jesus;  but  in  the  considerable  interval  between  their  com- 
position and  that  of  the  Fourth  Gospel  the  need  of  and  the  wish  for 
stronger  attestation  grew  apace.  John  and  his  circle  would  inevitably 
have  felt  this  most,  and  that  for  two  reasons:  first,  John  was  the  only 
apostle  to  whom  a  Gospel  is  ascribed;  and  second,  he  was  the  beloved 
disciple  who  stood  closest  to  Jesus  and  from  whom  most  would  be 
expected,  while  he  and  his  disciples  would  also  most  desire  to  help  out 
the  nascent  Church  at  this  its  weakest  point. 

(c)  Jesus'  Own  Resurrection. — The  accepted  miracles  of  Jesus 
readily  fall  into  two  classes,  the  least,  like  those  of  healing  slight  ailments, 
on  to  the  cures  of  chronic  and  constitutional  disorders,  and  thus  up  the 
ladder  to  the  two  earlier  resurrections,  which  the  synoptists  report  that 
Jesus  effected,  viz. ,  that  of  Jairus's  daughter  and  the  young  man.  Neither 
of  these  two  cases  of  resurrection  was  unimpeachable  by  carpers.  From 
them  to  Jesus'  own  Resurrection  was  a  very  long  step,  not  only  in  time 
(for  the  above  two  resurrection  miracles  came  relatively  early  in  Jesus' 
ministry) ,  but  in  convincing  power  and  in  fulness  of  attestation.  Here, 
then,  was  a  chasm,  a  veritable  missing  Hnk  which,  if  it  could  be  supplied, 
would  make  the  series  complete  and  rather  uniformly  graded,  so  as 
to  show  a  progressive  succession  of  tolerably  equal  steps  in  the  develop- 
ment of  Jesus'  power  and  also  in  the  development  of  the  power  of  faith 
in  his  followers.  Then  Jesus  would  stand  forth  in  a  new  light  as  being 
able  and  willing  to  vitalize  with  new  Hfe  all  who  needed  it,  all  the  way 
from  those  transiently  indisposed,  in  whom  the  energy  of  the  great 
biologos  was  temporarily  abated,  on  to  those  in  whom  it  was  entirely 
extinct.  Here,  then,  was  a  void  that  could  only  be  filled  by  a  miracle 
of  recuperation  more  marked  and  more  circumstantially  attested  than 
anything  in  the  three  then-existing  Gospels  or  in  the  Old  Testament. 
There  must  be  no  room  for  any  doubt  that  the  death  was  itself  real. 
It  must  be  of  some  definite  and  more  or  less  known  person  (although 
he  must  not  be  too  well  known;  John  the  Baptist,  e.  g.,  much  as  the 
disciples  might  have  wished  Jesus  to  raise  him,  would  not  do,  because 


640  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

all  persons  raised  from  the  dead  have  to  vanish  so  that  we  have  no 
subsequent  knowledge  of  their  Hves),  and  there  must  also  be  witnesses, 
both  friendly  and  hostile.  The  tomb  must  have  been  closed  securely, 
just  as  that  of  Jesus  had  been,  but  the  stone  must  be  removed  and  the 
corpse  go  forth  in  broad  daylight,  in  sight  of  all,  and  with  the  winding- 
sheet  still  about  him.  These  were  items  the  lack  of  which  in  the 
already  more  or  less  fixed  traditions  of  Jesus'  own  Resurrection  had 
been  found  painfully  lacking  in  effectiveness,  and  the  new  miracle  must 
supply  these  defects.  Moreover,  the  needed  miracle  must  be  placed 
at  what  has  often  been  called  the  dark  hour  of  Jesus'  ministry,  when 
he  was  most  depressed  and  felt  most  keenly  the  meshes  of  destiny 
closing  about  him.  This  period  of  his  ministry,  too,  was  relatively 
miracleless  and  somewhat  uneventful,  Jesus'  great  deeds  and  great 
doctrines  having  been  already  promulgated,  while  the  closing  scenes 
of  his  life  were  not  yet  begun.  There  was  a  rather  waste  place  that 
needed  a  great  event  to  give  better  proportion  and  more  orderly  pro- 
gression to  the  processional  of  his  story  on  earth.  Here,  too,  the 
fame  of  such  an  event  was  necessary  to  explain  the  otherwise  not  fully 
motivated  acclaim  that  the  synoptics  had  said  Jesus  was  met  \vith 
on  entering  Jersusalem.  Finally,  it  would  help  also  to  explain  and 
intensify  the  rancour  and  jealousy  of  the  envious  scribes  and  Pharisees 
in  Jerusalem.  Therefore  the  miracle  should  be  placed  near  and  not 
long  before  Jesus'  entry  into  this  city.  Thus  the  psychological  hour, 
place,  and  act  were  predetermined.  Something  adapted  to  meet  all 
these  specifications  ought  by  every  token  to  occur;  and,  therefore,  if  it 
was  beheved,  it  would  be  truer  than  historic  fact  because  it  would  have 
the  supreme  pragmatic  sanction  of  faith  that  is  above  sight. 

This  miracle,  as  we  read  it,  was  therefore  no  individual  fabrication, 
like  Plato's  myths,  but  something  that  inevitably  would  gradually 
develop  in  the  fructifying  psychic  soil  of  the  Johannin  group.  The 
soul-stuff  of  which  it  was  wholly  made  was  not  fantasy  alone,  but  had  a 
very  large  ingredient  of  practical  will  as  well.  It  was  long  especially 
dear  to  faith  because  made  warp  and  woof  of  faith.  To  us  to-day  it  is 
only  a  rare  and  fascinating  fossil  from  a  past  age  of  an  extinct  species, 
which  tells  us  only  what  religious  culture  history  used  to  be.  Its 
rejection  to-day  is  not  because  our  faith  is  less,  but  because  faith  now 
needs  new  and  higher  forms,  and,  like  the  chambered  nautilus,  the 
Christian  soul  must  build  for  itself  ever  larger  mansions. 


THE  MIRACXES  641 

In  the  early  Christian  centuries  it  became  very  much  the  fashion 
to  develop  miracles  for  edification  purposes,  as  is  copiously  illustrated 
all  the  way  from  the  apocryphal  Gospels  to  the  "Acta  Sanctorum." 
Pious  wishes  were  given  a  Hcense  in  construing  nature  because  the 
power  of  the  transcendent  was  prepotent  over  the  material  world  as 
never  before.  The  Jenseits  controlled  the  Diesseits  to  an  unparalleled 
degree;  for  this  world  was  nothing,  while  the  new  supernal  Kingdom 
of  the  future  was  all.  Earth  was  translucent  and  was  thus  also  tran- 
scended. It  was  very  soon  to  pass  away,  while  the  other  world  was 
eternal.  Hence  the  cosmos  as  we  know  it  was  only  a  symbol  of  the 
other  world,  and  faith  was  the  new-born  organ  and  sanctioned  belief 
in  what  man  fondly  longed  to  beUeve,  uncensored  by  criticism.  Science 
was  unknown,  and  its  earHest  votaries  when  they  arose  were  thought 
in  league  with  the  devil.  The  miracle  of  Lazarus  was  the  most  con- 
spicuous and  perhaps  the  first  fruit  of  this  type  of  fabrication.  It  was 
the  masterpiece  of  all  its  kind,  and  both  set  the  pattern  and  opened 
the  door  of  Ucense  for  hosts  of  inferior  creations  evolved  for  the  same 
purpose,  the  pious  end  of  which  was  felt  abundantly  to  justify  their 
construction.    This  justification  was  something  as  follows: 

Something  like  this  could  happen,  or  else  God's  omnipotence  was 
limited.  Moreover,  Jesus  had  arisen,  and  as  he  raised  himself  he  must 
be  able  to  raise  others;  and  he  had  promised  to  raise  all  the  dead  ere 
long.  A  paradigm  of  his  power  to  do  this  was  greatly  needed  as  an 
ante-past  and  guarantee  of  the  final  resurrection,  to  demonstrate  that 
he  could  reverse  the  normal  processes  of  decay.  An  ocular  demon- 
stration of  the  possibiUty  of  the  future  resurrection  of  all  men  was 
necessary,  or  else  it  might  be  and  was  said  that  "he  raised  himself , 
others  he  could  not  raise."  A  great  companion-piece  to  his  own  self- 
resuscitation  was  needed  wherein  he  revived  a  common,  average  man. 
It  was  meet  to  show  that  the  Father  could  raise  others  just  as  truly  as 
he  had  raised  his  only  begotten  Son.  Hence,  both  the  similarities  and 
the  contrast  between  these  two  events  were  especially  wrought  out. 
Like  Lazarus,  all  men  would  soon  be  raised,  and  the  good  would  follow 
Christ  to  heaven. 

It  was  also  so  certain  that  Jesus  could  have  done  it,  and  it  was 
so  urgent  that  he  should  have  done  it,  that  what  ought  to  be  must  be 
more  truly  than  what  really  is.  He  could  not  possibly  have  left  his 
earthly  work  with  so  obvious  a  lacuna,  and  therefore  he  must  have 


642  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

given  a  type  instance  of  his  power  to  raise  the  dead  that  would  be  no 
less  convincing  in  its  way  than  was  his  own  Resurrection.  It  was  a  case 
that  the  patristic  writers  described  as  fides  quaerens  objectum,  for  faith 
is  the  substance  of  things  hoped  for  and  the  evidence  of  things  not 
seen.  The  will  to  believe  must  have  an  object  on  which  to  wreak  itself, 
and  if  it  did  not  find  it,  had  to  make  one.  This  would  not  be  so  diffi- 
cult because  the  three  then-existing  Gospels  were  very  scrappy  and 
imperfect  jottings,  and  left  so  much  of  his  life  unwritten  that  all  the 
books  in  the  world,  we  are  told,  could  not  contain  it.  Hence  there  was 
a  free  field  for  this  non-Bergsonian  kind  of  creative  evolution,  for  the 
imagination,  as  Froscheimer  has  shown  us,  is  in  its  inmost  essence  a 
totalizing  faculty,  complementing  the  imperfections  of  the  individual 
with  the  perfections  of  the  whole.  This,  we  are  told,  is  its  chief  func- 
tion. Thus  we  can  see  that  this  miracle  was  no  extemporized  produc- 
tion, but  the  unique  and  classic  structure  of  its  type,  most  of  all 
independent  of  Old  Testament  analogies  and  allusions. 

Still,  as  others  have  pointed  out,  its  poets  or  artificers  took  sug- 
gestions from  diverse  sources.  Many  have  shown,  from  Strauss  to 
Jiilicher,  who  has  devoted  his  Hfe  to  the  study  of  the  parables,  how  they 
sometimes  shade  over  into,  overlap,  and  interpenetrate  miracles  in  a 
few  cases.  Thus  it  has  been  urged  that  the  Lazarus  here  was  bor- 
rowed from  the  blind  beggar  of  the  parable  whom  Luke  represents 
as  sitting  covered  with  sores  at  Dives's  gate,  and  after  death  as  trans- 
ferred to  Abraham's  bosom.  Both  are  sick,  both  die  and  are  buried. 
The  one  did  return  from  the  grave,  and  the  other  desired  to  do  so, 
but  was  not  allowed  because  the  brethren  he  wished  to  warn  would  not 
beUeve,  just  as  the  Jews  did  not  believe  the  Johannin  Lazarus  really 
did  return.  Thus  the  thought  of  reveniance,  the  name  of  the  hero  of 
it,  and  that  of  his  sisters,  given  by  Luke,  serve  perhaps  as  points  de 
repere  for  the  Fourth  Evangelist,  so  that  Lazarus  was  resurrected, 
in  another  sense,  by  being  transferred  from  an  allegorical  existence 
in  a  parable  to  a  flesh-and-blood  personaUty.  The  rest  of  the  nar- 
rative was  framed  to  fit  the  various  exigencies  of  the  situation  as  we 
have  seen  them.  Very  probably  this  entire  narrative  of  forty-five 
verses  grew  gradually  into  its  final  form  from  many  repetitions,  inter- 
polations, and  excisions,  till  a  slowly  evolving  consensus  made  it  fit 
the  psychological  exigencies  to  a  degree  that  merely  historical  hap- 
penings rarely,  if  ever,  do. 


THE  MIRACLES  643 

It  should  be  distinctly  understood  that  the  word  "fabrication" 
is  taken  here  in  its  literal  sense  of  making,  as  a  poet  is  a  maker,  and  not 
at  all  in  its  derived  sense,  which  impHes  some  degree  of  falsification. 
So  anchored  were  these  "makers"  in  truth  that  they  could  freely  with 
poetic  license  "play  with  gracious  lies."  Like  their  master,  yet  more 
often,  the  Johannin  group  of  followers  was  prone  to  exaltation,  not 
only  owing  to  their  theme  and  also  the  tensity  of  the  times,  but  because 
in  them  these  tendencies  were  reinforced  by  a  mildly  erethic  diathesis 
of  soul  which  predisposed  them  to  visions  and  revelations.  They  were 
poets  under  the  inspiration  of  a  new  muse  which  they  revered  under 
the  name  of  the  Holy  Ghost.  So  multifarious  were  these  impulsions 
that  they  w^ere  exhorted  to  test  all  spirits  to  see  if  they  were  good,  and 
to  discard  others.  Thus  such  a  formation  as  this  truly  nascitur 
nonft,  and  it  was  accepted  with  an  enthusiasm  that  was  psychologically 
identical,  being  less  only  in  degree,  with  that  which  evolved  it.  For 
it  must  not  be  forgotten  that  we  are  always  here  in  the  realm  of  James's 
"higher  powers  of  man,"  where  the  phenomena  are  all  normal  but 
of  unusual  altitude,  like  the  exhilaration  that  both  myth  and  experience 
ascribe  to  mountain-tops. 

Now  precisely  this  strong  fecund  tendency  to  make  edification- 
value  the  supreme  test  of  truth,  a  tendency  so  vital  that  it  persisted 
long  after  it  had  degenerated  to  fatuousness,  was  very  largely  the 
natural  result  of  Jesus'  own  chronically  transcendent  state  of  mind, 
and  also  of  his  notable  pedagogic  invention  of  the  parable,  which  con- 
sisted of  incidents  only  spiritually  true.  Not  only  to  art  but  to  Chris- 
tian experience  the  prodigal  son  is  as  real  as,  if  not  more  so  than,  the 
Lazarus  of  the  resurrection.  The  disciples  must  often  have  wondered 
whether  Jesus  was  telling  an  apt  anecdote  of  some  one  who  really  lived 
and  whom  he  knew,  recounting  things  that  actually  happened,  or 
hypothecating  both  persons  and  events  to  meet  a  practical  exigency 
or  a  didactic  end  for  which  only  verisimilitude  was  needed.  With 
Jesus  there  was  no  confusing  of  the  parables  he  told  and  the  miracles 
he  did.  The  substance  of  the  former  is  always  a  natural,  if  not  com- 
mon, event  from  daily  life,  and  so  the  very  opposite  of  a  marvel.  But 
if  common  occurrences  could  be  fabricated  for  heuristic  ends,  sooner 
or  later  it  would  inevitably  be  asked  why  unconmaon  events  could  not 
be  thus  used,  especially  since  the  latter  had  now  become  an  integral 
part  of  the  new  order  of  things  and  in  excited  minds  prone  to  supersti- 


644  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

tion  were  common  enough.  Again,  Jesus  regarded  his  healings  as 
mainly  symbols  of  healing  the  soul  from  the  ravages  of  sin.  Thus  it 
was  not  strange  if  the  real  truth  of  all  things  came  to  consist  in  their 
higher  meanings,  and  the  value  of  historicity  as  such  inevitably  suf- 
fered relative  decline.  The  parabUng  of  Jesus  thus  proved  to  be  the 
innocent  and  unsuspected  beginning  of  a  new  test  of  objective  truth 
and  reality.  Hence,  in  another  sense,  the  story  of  Lazarus  is  a  precious 
missing  Hnk,  for  it  Hes  half  way  between  the  parabling  propensity  of 
the  Great  Teacher  and  the  miracle-mongering  of,  e.  g.,  the  Bolandist 
fathers  in  whom  creduhty  stopped  at  nothing,  however  preposterous, 
if  they  thought  it  contained  spiritual  edification.  Absurd  to  reason 
and  abominable  to  science  as  the  tale  of  a  reanimated  corpse  is,  it 
nevertheless  glows  deep  down  in  the  soul  below  consciousness  in  all, 
however  rational  or  scientific,  when  the  lust  for  personal  survival 
beyond  this  fife  is  strong.  Unconjugated  as  it  is  by  any  mood  or  tense 
of  the  grammar  of  assent  as  Newman  construed  it,  under  the  severest 
ban  of  logic,  bewusstseinsunfahig  to  the  cultured  modern  mind,  out- 
lawed by  the  higher  and  often  even  the  lower  criticism,  surd  and 
anachronism  as  it  now  is,  nevertheless,  when  in  revery  childish  wish- 
dreams  recur  in  those  souls  in  whom  the  supreme  question  they  put  to 
Hfe  is  to  know  whether  when  a  man  die  he  shall  live  again,  this  pre- 
posterous tale  grows  warm  and  phosphoresces  deep  down  in  the  heart, 
the  oldest  part  of  our  psychic  organism.  Thus,  as  at  last  spring  re- 
animates nature ;  thus,  too,  as  the  immortal  germ  plasm  is  resurrected 
out  of  the  moribund  soma  in  each  generation  by  love;  so  the  often 
idiotic  prose  of  superstition  may  be  rescued  to  the  highest  uses  by 
poetic  genius.  It  was  reserved  to  geneticism  to  teach  us  that  things 
utterly  false  on  the  lowest  may  be  Bible  truths  in  the  highest  psychic 
levels. 

(C)  Cures  at  a  Distance. — Of  cures  at  a  distance  there  are  several 
narratives.  The  centurion  was  of  gentile  birth,  but  a  lover  of  the 
Jews,  and  had  built  them  a  synagogue.  His  son  was  paralyzed,  tor- 
mented, and,  Luke  says,  about  to  die.  Matthew's  less  artificial  ac- 
count says  the  centurion  came  himself;  Luke,  that  he  sent  messengers 
twice.  He  would  invite  Jesus,  but  was  unworthy  to  receive  him.  He 
had  faith  in  his  power  to  command  spirits,  which  he  thought  analogous 
to  his  own  to  command  his  soldiers.  He  believed  Jesus  could  heal  with 
a  word  at  a  distance.    Remarking  (in  a  phrase  sometimes  challenged 


THE  MIRACLES  645 

as  rupturing  the  spirit  both  of  the  narrative  and  the  general  purpose  of 
the  Evangelist  who  records  it)  that  this  faith  was  greater  than  he  had 
found  in  Israel,  Jesus  said  that  it  would  be  to  him  according  to  his 
belief.  John's  edition  of  this  miracle  is  so  different  that  some  have 
thought  it  another  event.  It  is  now  the  son  of  a  nobleman,  perhaps  a 
Jew,  at  the  point  of  death  with  a  fever.  Jesus  said,  "thy  son  hveth," 
and  it  was  later  found  that  he  began  to  mend  the  same  hour.  Then 
the  father  and  his  house  believed. 

With  this  double  narrative  we  can  hardly  identify,  as  some  do,  the 
other  case  of  healing  at  a  distance,  the  daughter  of  the  Greek  woman 
vexed  with  a  devil.  She  is  far  more  gentile  than  the  centurion,  and 
Jesus  was  reluctant  because  he  declared  that  he  was  sent  to  save  only 
in  Israel,  and  that  the  children's  bread  should  not  be  cast  to  dogs. 
But  she  importuned  that  dogs  might  eat  the  crumbs  that  fell  from  the 
table.  Commending  her  faith,  he  granted  her  wish,  and  her  daughter 
was  made  whole,  for  the  devil  left  her.  Mark  omits  the  account  of  the 
centurion,  although  its  attendant  lessons  would  harmonize  with  his 
spirit,  but  records  that  of  the  Greek  girl.  This  is  said  to  indicate 
identity  and  to  support  the  hypothesis  of  the  greatest  freedom  of  treat- 
ment of  the  same  material.  But,  on  the  other  hand,  Matthew  contains 
both,  which  shows  that  he  regarded  them  as  two,  as,  indeed,  most  have 
held.  Each  raises  the  question  of  Jesus'  service  to  those  who  are  not 
Jews,  although  the  centurion  may  have  been  a  proselyte  as  well  as  a 
benefactor,  and  this  may  account  for  Jesus'  friendly  spirit  toward  the 
one  appeal  and  his  reluctance  toward  the  other.  The  difficulty  with 
John's  nobleman  is  that  he  travels  so  slowly  a  distance  of  only  five 
leagues  homeward  to  reach  his  dying  son,  although  this  loitering  has 
on  the  other  hand  been  regarded  as  an  indication  of  his  certainty  that 
the  cure  had  been  efifected  and  that  his  presence  at  home  was  not 
needed.  These  cures  at  a  distance  exclude  not  only  contact  but  prob- 
ably faith  on  the  patient's  part.  Strauss  regards  the  first  incident  as  a 
fictitious  imitation  of  Elisha's  cure  of  the  leper  Naaman  at  a  distance, 
and  thinks  each  may  typify  and  foreshow  the  penetration  of  Jesus* 
influence  into  far-off  gentile  lands.  Paulus  assumes  a  messenger  sent 
to  communicate  the  cure.  If  the  son  and  daughter  knew  their  parents' 
mission,  faith  and  expectation  may  not  have  been  absent;  and  some 
have  challenged  only  the  coincidence  of  the  telepathic  word  and  the 
curing,  assuming  that  the  joyful  confidence  of  the  parent  or  messenger 


646  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

upon  his  return  gave  the  curative  stimulus.  Magnetism  and  a  "direct 
mental  path"  have  also  been  assumed. 

The  heaHng  miracles  are  often  graded  as,  first,  those  with  material 
means,  sahva,  clay,  washing;  second,  touching;  third,  by  words  alone, 
when  the  patient  was  present ;  fourth,  by  a  word  efficacious  at  a  distance, 
and,  lastly,  with  no  will,  intent,  or  even  knowledge  on  Jesus'  part, 
curative  power  being,  as  it  were,  surreptitiously  drawn  from  him  when 
he  had  no  purpose  to  heal.  It  is  a  moot  point  whether  a  cure  thus 
stolen  by  touching  his  garment  ever  became  efficacious  if  he  did  not 
know  it  at  once  afterward,  while  some  imply  that  even  an  accidental 
contact  with  his  garments  unbeknown  to  him,  and  also  with  no  intent 
or  knowledge  on  the  patient's  part,  was  really  curative. 

In  these  cases,  as  elsewhere,  the  discrepancies  in  the  various 
accounts  can  best  be  explained  as  showing  "an  increasing  materializa- 
tion of  the  idea  of  a  miracle,"  while  the  above  series  from  the  applica- 
tion of  remedies  to  accidental  contact  and  action  at  a  distance  show  a 
growing  abandon  to  belief  in  some  magical  agency  with  which  Jesus' 
body  was  charged,  but  the  loss  of  which  left  him  depleted  for  a  time 
of  healing  virtue,  even  without  knowing  whose  touch  drew  upon  it. 
A  further  growth  of  the  same  tendency  later  made  handkerchiefs, 
aprons,  and  even  the  shadow  of  Peter  efficacious,  as  we  find  in  the 
Acts,  and  thence  led  to  the  belief  in  the  therapeutic  power  of  tombs 
like  that  of  the  Abb6  of  Paris,  and  in  relics,  and  bones  provided  they 
were  believed  to  be  those  of  saints;  for  here  faith  is  essential.  To  ex- 
plain Jesus'  power  to  project  his  will  at  a  distance  apologists  often 
remind  us  of  the  phenomenal  nature  of  space,  which  is  only  for  cor- 
poreal nature  and  not  for  spiritual  things.  Spiritual  powers  are  not 
bound  down  to  our  common  space  of  three  dimensions. 

These  tendencies  show  to  psychoanalysis  a  strong  but  blind  im- 
pulse in  the  early  Christian  consciousness  toward  sublimation,  a  ten- 
dency, however,  mistaken  in  kind  and  direction.  When  the  Gospels 
were  composed  Jesus  had  long  since  ascended  and  the  salvatory  power 
of  his  personality  had  to  act  at  a  distance  or  not  at  all,  and  so  an  in- 
stance of  his  telepathy  while  on  earth  was  sorely  needed.  If  he  could 
heal  a  few  leagues  away,  he  might  still  exert  his  healing  power  from 
his  heavenly  home.  His  person  here  had  been  uniquely  magnetic,  his 
spirit  contagious,  his  will  compeUing;  and  his  Resurrection  body  might 
be  conceived  as  vastly  more  so  to  faith.     Every  vestige  and  reUc 


THE  MIRACLES  647 

of  him  thus  become  an  Archimedean  fulcrum  of  leverage  for  the  faith 
that  could  remove  mountains  of  guilt  from  man's  sin-sick  soul.  Jesus 
was  an  embodied  panacea  for  all  human  ills,  sarcous  and  psychic.  He 
was  Ufe  and  health,  which  latter  word  means  wholeness  or  hoHness. 
The  Great  Physician  had  been  supercharged  with  therapeutic,  ortho- 
paedic, euthenic  power,  and  where  he  had  gone  there  could  be  no  sick- 
ness or  sorrow.  How  could  this  great  inspiring  conviction  be  imparted 
with  the  culture  resources  then  at  his  disciples'  disposal?  It  was  too 
great  for  any  of  the  devices  of  rhetoric.  No  figurative  language  could 
compass  it.  History  afforded  no  adequate  precedents,  examples,  or 
illustrations  of  it,  and  so  there  was  no  possible  recourse  save  to  couch 
the  message  of  this  new  muse  in  a  new  language,  and  thus  and  for  this 
purpose  the  healing  miracle  was  created. 

In  referring  to  the  vindictive  miracle  of  cursing  the  fig-tree  at  a 
distance,  Mark  makes  it  cursed  one  day  and  withered  the  next,  as  one 
blind  man  was  cured  in  stages.  It  is  added  that  the  time  of  fruit  was 
not  yet,  which  was  true  in  Judea  the  week  before  Easter.  Why, 
therefore,  was  it  cursed  for  not  bearing  fruit  out  of  its  season?  The 
only  answer  is  that  this  tree  was  a  symbol  of  unfruitful  Israel,  at  the 
root  of  which  the  axe  was  laid.  In  the  parable  of  the  fig-tree,  barren 
for  two  years  and  condemned  to  be  cut  down,  the  gardener  pleaded 
that  he  be  allowed  to  give  it  special  attention  for  another  season,  and 
if  it  then  remained  barren  it  might  be  felled  without  further  grace. 
But  there  is  no  respite  or  parley,  but  a  curse  that  blights  at  once. 
Thus  the  divine  wrath,  like  love,  is  telepathic,  and  thus  even  from  high 
heaven  the  wicked  may  be  smitten.  Thus  Jesus  is  invested  with  the 
power  of  black,  as  of  white,  magic. 

(D)  Nature  Miracles:  (a)  The  Water  Made  Wine. — Perhaps  the 
first  of  all  Jesus'  miracles,  marking  his  d6but  as  a  wonder-worker,  and 
certainly  the  first  nature  miracle  (recorded  only  by  John),  was  at  Cana. 
Here  and  at  this  time  in  Galilee  experts  tell  us  wedding  festivities  lasted 
a  week.  All  the  guests  were  exalted,  and  the  wine  was  exhausted. 
Jesus'  mother  called  his  attention  to  the  fact,  as  if  she  expected  he  could 
and  would  reUeve  the  situation.  He  protested  with  some  apparent 
resentment,  because  his  hour  was  not  yet  come;  but  acquiesced, 
though  under  protest,  either  as  if  to  humour  her,  or  in  response  to  so 
open  a  challenge  to  help  on  the  revels,  and  with  no  modern  temper- 
ance scruples.    By  his  order  six  stone  jars,  holding,  according  to 


648  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

research  into  the  antiquities  of  that  age,  from  one  hundred  and  eight 
to  one  hundred  and  sixty-two  gallons,  were  filled  to  the  brim  with 
water,  and  it  was  found,  apparently  almost  on  the  instant  and  without 
word,  prayer,  sign,  or  effort  on  his  part,  that  all  this  water  was  tran- 
speciated  into  wine,  and  that  of  the  very  best  quaHty,  suggesting  further 
jollity  and  inebriation. 

It  is  both  pathetic  and  ludicrous  to  see  how  the  Christian  con- 
sciousness has  so  crassly  and  persistently  attempted  to  make  bread 
out  of  this  stone  of  stumbling  and  offence.  If  it  were  a  miracle  of 
transpeciation,  Jesus  was  here  doing  something  very  akin  to  what  he 
had  a  few  days  before  refused  to  do  at  Satan's  behest.  Now  he  would 
be  doing  it  only  to  further  luxury  and  the  delectation  of  a  merry  mar- 
riage party,  when  he  would  not  do  it  to  save  himself  from  death  by 
thirst  and  starvation.  Regarded  as  a  factual  miracle,  it  is  both 
clumsy  and  unmotivated,  the  product  of  an  idle  whim  or  caprice,  and 
as  senseless  as  animating  mud  birds  and  making  them  fly  away,  as  an 
apocryphal  Gospel  said  Jesus  did  as  a  lad. 

It  would  be  hard  to  say  whether  the  orthodox  literalists  or  the 
early  rationalists  have  been  most  absurd.  Paulus  thought  it  all  a 
sportive  wedding  jest  in  which  wine  was  secretly  smuggled  in  by  some 
collusive  trick  or  conjuring.  Ammon  suggested  some  unrecorded  use 
of  "spirits  of  wine,"  and  Langerdorf  says  it  was  done  by  some  unknown 
use  of  "extracts  of  herbs."  Others  have  thought  it  might  be  a  case 
of  making  bitter  water  sweet,  hard  water  soft,  or  impure  water  pure. 
A  long  list  of  mystic  intermediate  substances  has  been  proposed,  while 
some  have  suggested  that  the  miracle  consisted  in  tinging  the  water 
with  blood,  perhaps  that  of  Jesus,  as  a  symbol  of  his  coming  death  and 
of  its  atoning  power.  The  learned,  pious,  and  voluminous  expositor 
and  commentator  Lange,  naively  intimated  that  it  might  have  been 
Seltzer  water  or  a  magnetized  water,  while  others  have  suggested  that 
it  was  perhaps  from  an  effervescing  or  mineral  spring  near  by  which 
only  Jesus  knew,  by  revelation,  or  perhaps  naturally.  Many  have  had 
recourse  to  the  very  hard-worked  hypothesis  of  accelerated  natural 
processes  by  which  water  poured  on  the  roots  of  vines  in  the  spring 
would  become  wine  after  the  grapes  were  trodden  and  fermented  in 
vats  in  the  fall;  while  here  the  same  process  in  all  its  stages  was  rushed 
through  as  if  time  had  been  dissolved  into  a  Bergsonian  eternal  dura- 
tion.   Unlike  most  miracles,  this  has  no  analogue  in  the  Old  Testament, 


THE  MIRACLES  649 

and  just  what  event,  if  any,  underlies  the  narrative  we  can  probably 
never  know. 

Somewhat  more  insightful  apologists  have  taken  refuge  in  the 
hypothesis  of  mental  exaltation,  a  state  to  which  the  guests  toward 
the  end  of  a  hilarious  week,  where  they  had  exceeded  the  expectations 
of  entertainers  in  consuming  wine,  might  be  predisposed.  Their 
condition  would  make  water  taste  like  wine,  and  so  their  imaginations 
would  give  the  effects  of  its  imbibition  increased  potency.  For 
Beyschlag  the  incident  showed  Jesus'  power  over  minds.  The  fluid 
was  itself  unchanged,  but  those  who  drank  it  were  entranced  and  per- 
haps half  hypnotized,  and  so  were  made  to  think  it  wine  and  excellent. 
Thus  Jesus  was  really  bringing  the  guests  out  of  their  state  of  semi- 
inebriation  by  working  a  most  commendable  illusion.  The  more  con- 
servative Weiss  says  in  substance  that  Jesus  only  ordered  the  jars 
filled,  and  then  stood  aside  while  God  the  onmipotent  did  the  great 
work  of  transformation. 

Besides  its  inherent  and  utter  incredibihty  as  a  fact,  the  richness 
and  appositeness  of  it  as  a  symbol  of  many  things  must  convince  every 
candid  and  insightful  mind  that  we  have  here  a  group  of  ideas  and 
feehngs  clothing  themselves  in  the  form  of  a  physical  process.  As  an 
allegory  rather  than  as  a  fact  it  is  all  most  pregnant  and  pertinent. 
Keim  suggests  that  it  means  that  Judaism  had  no  more  wine,  but  must 
be  supplemented  by  the  Christian  water  of  purification  and  baptism, 
made  here  still  more  effective  as  a  type  of  spiritual  wine.  Again 
Jesus  was  no  fasting  ascetic,  but  a  bringer  of  joy  ineffable,  such  as  the 
marriage  of  the  faithful  to  the  heavenly  Bridegroom  brings.  Thus  we 
have  here  the  keynote  to  his  ministry  as  he  steps  into  pubHcity  out 
from  the  shadow  of  the  Baptist.  Again,  it  has  been  conceived  as  an 
intermediate  step  between  ceremonial  washing  and  the  complete 
cleansing  with  Jesus'  blood,  while  the  festive  wine  is  prelusive  of  the 
joy  of  the  Holy  Ghost.  Jesus'  nature  had  just  undergone  a  trans- 
formation from  humanity  to  conscious  divinity,  well  typified  by  chang- 
ing water  to  wine.  To  his  new  theanthropic  consciousness  all  nature 
and  life  were  also  thus  and  thereby  sublimated,  as  if  from  aqueous  to 
vinous.  Wine  exalts,  and  his  own  experience  had  brought  his  soul  into 
a  more  or  less  ecstatic  state  illustrative  of  the  higher  powers  of  man  or 
a  kind  of  second  breath  reinforcement.  It  was  prelusive  of  the  sacra- 
ment of  communion  to  be  later  established.    The  magic  metamor- 


650  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

phosis  has  a  wedding  as  its  background,  because  the  miracle  of  love 
typified  how  Jesus'  soul  had  just  been  wedded  to  God,  and  so  it  is  a 
symbol  of  the  soul's  union  with  the  All-Father.  This  wine  was  the 
culminating  and  the  best,  and  especially  satisfying  after  other  poorer 
wines,  just  as  the  thirst  of  Jesus'  soul  had  been  completely  slaked  by 
the  water  of  eternal  life  after  partaking  of  which  no  one  ever  thirsts 
again.  If  we  thus  conceive  the  material  as  swallowed  up  in  a  new 
dispensation  of  higher  spiritual  truths  the  incident  is  not  only  saved 
from  scoffers  but  may  be  used  for  those  whose  souls  suffer  from  Silber- 
er's^  apperceptive  insufficiency  and  who  must  take  hold  of  great  and 
high  truths  by  some  sjTuboUc  handle.  Every  item  fits  this  kind  of 
interpretation,  and  people  are  more  prone  to  cling  to  factual  events 
just  so  far  as  they  fail  to  see  and  feel  the  power  of  their  higher  and 
transcendent  significance,  so  that  literal  belief  often  involves  loss  of  the 
power  of  higher  spiritual  insight.  Whether  the  Cana  incident  was  a 
moving  pictograph,  dream,  or  revery  in  Jesus'  soul,  or  evolved  collec- 
tively in  the  Johannin  group  of  his  followers  after  his  death,  it  certainly 
has  very  many  determinants,  so  that  its  interpretation  is  obvious  and 
its  form  easily  explicable.  Because  it  was  so  surcharged  with  meaning, 
its  crassLfication  into  a  banal  fact  was  to  have  been  expected  by  those 
who  realize  how  tropes  thus  charged  with  multifarious  significance 
are  inevitably  literalized,  because  the  mind  vaguely  feels  vastly  more 
than  it  can  understand.  This  we  now  can  see  pretty  well  by  the 
suggestions  that  have  come  to  myth-study  from  a  psychoanalysis  of 
the  psychological  laws  that  govern  such  formations.  The  precise  point 
at  which  this  is  placed,  viz.,  just  after  Jesus'  call  to  Divine  Sonship 
and  his  acceptance  of  it,  was  admirably  chosen.  At  the  same  time, 
this  makes  it  suspicious  as  a  narrative  of  an  objective  happening,  but 
luminous  and  bientrouve  as  an  effective,  dramatic,  rhetorical,  pedagogic 
device. 

It  is  not  entirely  satisfactory  to  regard  this  record  as  the  manifest 
content  of  a  collective  dream  of  the  inner  Johannin  circle  of  Jesus' 
followers,  possibly  based  on  some  trivial  incident,  or  perhaps  a  de  novo 
creation  of  the  seer  of  that  circle  which  came  to  be  adopted  by  it.  As 
alchemy  sought  to  change  baser  metal  into  gold,  and  was  itself  moti- 
vated by  every  deep  aspiration  of  all  its  devotees  and  enmeshed  in 
countless  allegorical  meanings,  so  this  fluid  alchemy  of  water  into  wine 

•"Problem*  der  Myitik  und  ihrer  Symbolik."    VVIen,  1914,  aSj  p. 


THE  MIRACLES  651 

was  not  a  parable  or  vision,  but  an  apologue  of  spiritual  transformation 
converted  downward  until  it  seemed  anchored  to  fact.  It  was  set 
forth  with  due  Rucksicht  auf  Darstellbarkeit  so  that  it  might  conceivably 
be  made  into  a  miracle  play  showing  Jesus  as  the  most  conspicuous 
exemplifier  of  the  higher  powers  of  man  and  of  the  now  ecstatic  state 
on  which  he  had  entered  after  the  baptism,  and  to  which  his  former 
life  was  as  moonlight  to  sunlight,  or  as  water  to  wine.  For  such  a  mir- 
acle we  have  no  name.  Neither  ideo-,  mytho-,  or  thumo-gram  is  quite 
fit.  It  is  in  fact  a  parable  fossilized,  a  purely  psychic  structure  with 
not  the  slightest  element  of  objective  or  historic  truthfulness  in  the 
world  of  fact.  It  is  thus  twice  a  miracle,  first  in  that  it  was  a  new  and 
original  pedagogic  masterpiece  in  embodying  a  momentous  new,  mean- 
ingful insight,  viz.,  that  of  the  new  and  higher  life  about  to  be  revealed 
by  Jesus'  words  and  deeds.  The  necessity  of  expressing  a  new  psychic 
content  is  sometimes  so  great  that  the  crassest  terms  of  its  utterances 
give  relief  and  come  to  be  believed  because  they  are  absurd,  for  only 
absurdity  can  adequately  utter  novelty.  Secondly,  such  a  structure 
as  this  is  an  almost  ideal  test  and  measure  of  psychic  and  religious 
insight.  The  moron  type  of  comprehension  regards  it  as  a  kind  of  fact 
fetish,  while  to  the  higher  type  of  comprehension  it  reveals  itself 
as  what  it  really  is — a  splendid  trope  of  a  profoundly  characteristic 
religious  experience.  The  religious  fetishist,  however,  we  must  not 
forget,  has  an  important  function,  viz.,  that  of  conserving  the  form  in 
which  many  precious  meanings  are  wrapped  up  unchanged  from  age  to 
age;  while,  on  the  other  hand,  if  all  saw  only  the  content  the  form  would 
be  slowly  dissipated  and  thus  that  precious  content  lost.  Thus  we 
have  here  a  congeries  of  normal  complexes  standardized  and  conserved 
by  what  we  call  orthodoxy,  embodying  a  new  and  transforming  point 
of  view,  desiccated  and  mummified  but  resurrectable  in  any  soul  vital 
enough  to  transmute  baser,  sarcous  into  higher,  pneumatic  elements. 

The  early  Church  must  have  felt  this  impulse  to  enshrine  spiritual 
meanings  in  marvellous  tales,  because  the  lives  of  the  saints,  thousands 
of  whom  the  Bolandists  have  recorded  during  the  last  four  centuries, 
are  a  welter  of  so-called  miracles  of  edification  which  are  psychic  con- 
structions once  of  great  heuristic  value  but  now  rendered  ineffective  by 
science.  Such  writers  took  Hberties  with  nature's  uniformity,  as 
poetic  license  does  with  syntax  and  grammar,  and  felt  justified  in  so 
doing  in  order  to  convey  higher  meanings;  for  new  wine  must  be  put 


6S2  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF   PSYCHOLOGY 

into  new  bottles.  The  Cana  marvel,  however,  was  no  product  of 
caprice  or  wanton  individual  fancy,  but  an  almost  inevitable  construc- 
tion of  zeal  in  its  first  intention  for  propagating  Gospel  truth.  As 
great  situations  bring  forth  great  men,  so  these  products  of  expositorial 
energumens  struck  out  as  by  a  spark  of  genius  an  incident  that  pre- 
cisely filled  and  fitted  all  things,  because,  while  couched  in  terms  of 
sense,  they  really  say  things  only  to  the  subconscious  intuition.  Such  a 
happening  becomes  in  a  sense  a  new  technical  term  well  adapted  for 
general  currency.  While,  if  considered  as  a  mere  factual  event,  it 
serves  admirably  as  a  religious  fool-finder,  it  makes  its  own  deeper 
appeal  to  the  affectivity  and  autistic  nature  of  all  in  whom  this  deeper 
stratum  of  psychic  life  exists. 

(b)  The  Miraculous  Draught  of  Fishes. — According  to  Matthew  and 
Mark,  Jesus  saw  Simon  Peter  and  Andrew  fishing  and  said.  Follow  me 
and  I  will  make  you  fishers  of  men.  Farther  on  he  saw  James  and 
John  mending  nets,  called  them,  and  they  left  their  father  and  followed 
him.  Luke,  however,  has  a  fuller  and  very  different  account.  Pressed 
by  the  crowd,  Jesus  came  upon  two  empty  fishing  boats  and  had  the 
owner  of  one  take  him  aboard  and  push  out  a  little  from  the  shore  be- 
cause of  the  crowd,  and  taught,  sitting  in  it.  When  he  had  finished  he 
told  the  obliging  owner  of  the  boat  to  put  out  and  cast  his  net,  indi- 
cating the  place.  Doubtless  because  he  had  caught  nothing  all  night, 
Peter  remonstrated,  and  then  yielded,  catching  so  many  fish  that  the 
nets  broke  and  they  called  the  second  pair  of  fishermen  brothers  to 
their  aid.  Both  boats  were  filled  with  fish  to  the  sinking  point. 
All  were  astonished,  and  Simon  with  characteristic  impulsiveness  fell 
at  Jesus'  feet,  saying,  Depart  from  me.  Master,  for  I  am  a  sinner. 
Jesus  replied.  Fear  not  but  have  faith;  thou  shalt  catch  men.  Having 
landed,  they  forsook  all  and  followed  him. 

Thus  the  miraculous  draft  of  fishes  is  in  Luke  only  and  he  tells 
it  apparently  to  explain  what  seemed  to  him  a  greater  marvel,  viz., 
why  according  to  the  earlier  reports,  four  hard-working  fishermen  should 
on  the  instant  leave  all  to  follow  a  stranger.  According  to  Luke,  they 
had  felt  the  spell  of  Jesus'  discourse,  which  might  well  have  been  on  the 
symbolism  or  higher  parable-like  meaning  of  the  vocation  his  lakeside 
audience  knew  best.  They  had  also  had  a  demonstration  of  his  strange 
and  uncanny  power  to  locate  fish,  and  by  the  use  of  it  had  certainly 
acquired  a  tiny  fortune.    In  Matthew  and  Mark  the  call  and  the  obe- 


THE  MIRACLES  653 

dience  to  it  by  this  quaternion  of  fishermen  seems  a  psychological  mir- 
acle of  almost  hypnotic  will-compelling  power,  while  Luke  finds  a 
natural  motivation  in  a  physical  miracle,  a  distinct  step  downward 
showing  both  Jesus  and  these  disciples  in  a  weird  Hght.  Jesus'  per- 
sonal power  over  the  will  of  others  is  lessened,  while  the  alacrity  of 
obedience  with  which  the  call  is  obeyed  suggests  an  element  of  sordid- 
ness. 

It  has  been  asked  why,  when  convinced  of  Jesus'  power  to  locate 
fish  as  they  could  not,  they  did  not  urge  him  to  enter  their  calling 
instead  of  leaving  it  themselves  on  the  moment  of  their  greatest  success. 
Some  have  assumed  a  bargain  by  which  Jesus  promised  to  return  and 
repeat  the  miracle  from  time  to  time,  so  that  they  would  really  catch 
more  fish  if  they  spent  the  interim  with  him,  on  which  view  of  course 
their  allegiance  was  bought,  or  they  were  freed  for  a  time  by  the  great 
haul  to  follow  their  inclinations.  Carpers  have  objected  that  whatever 
may  be  true  of  shad,  herring,  and  mackerel  in  the  sea,  fish  never  as- 
semble so  densely  in  a  lake  of  this  size  as  to  make  such  catches  as  are 
here  described  possible,  and  also  that  the  fish  now  in  this  lake  do  not 
do  so.  It  has  even  been  argued  that  all  of  the  species  of  fish  which  had 
this  pecuhar  instinct  of  flocking  together  were  here  caught  and  their 
race  made  extinct.  At  any  rate,  we  are  told  that  fish  in  this  lake  now 
show  no  such  habits.  Another  view  is  that  Jesus  noticed  the  shoal  of 
fish  when  he  was  speaking,  and  when  he  was  through  naturally  called 
Simon's  attention  to  it;  while  still  another  commentator  urges  that  the 
multitude  had  drawn  the  fish  together  in  great  numbers  by  throwing 
crumbs  from  their  lunch  into  the  water.  Still  another  says  that  if  it 
was  a  true  miracle  Jesus  must  have  had  not  merely  the  power  to  per- 
ceive but  to  gather  fish  as  Orpheus  did  beasts;  that  such  was  Jesus' 
magnetic  charm  that  even  aquatic  forms  of  life  were  attracted,  indi- 
cating a  sympathy  of  nature  with  supreme  virtue,  although  it  has  been 
objected  that  this  was  inconsistent  with  other  intimations  that  Jesus 
felt  kindly  toward  birds  and  flowers  while  he  lured  the  poor  fish  to 
their  destruction. 

All  this  materialization  of  metaphors  and  allegories,  so  character- 
istic of  infantilism,  is  at  the  same  time  pathetic  and  full  of  the  charm 
of  naivete,  and  so  at  the  other  extreme  is  the  pedantic  skepticism  as 
to  whether  the  first  disciples  were  really  ever  fishermen  at  all,  but 
that  the  typological  force  of  the  analogy  between  fish  and  making 


654  JESUS   IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

converts  transformed  their  vocation  as  well  as  invented  the  miracle. 
The  Kingdom  is  a  net,  gathering  good  and  bad,  to  be  sorted  later. 
Max  Miiller,  Coxe,  Kiihn,  and  many  others  have  abundantly  shown 
how  metaphors  do  often  tend  to  be  taken  Hterally  and  so  become  the 
germ  of  mythology,  and  how  spiritual  meanings  tend,  as  by  a  law  of 
psychic  gravity,  to  lower  Uteral  and  material  levels.  Of  this  law  we 
must  conclude  that  we  have  here  another  illustration,  and  that  the 
power  of  Jesus'  discourse  in  the  boat  and  the  enthusiasm  of  a  newly 
awakened  consciousness  of  a  great  redemptive  work  in  these  four  men 
who  now  perhaps  come  over  from  John's  mission,  now  put  vividly 
into  terms  of  their  own  calling,  rather  than  a  command  to  follow 
reinforced  by  a  miracle,  made  them  devote  themselves  to  Jesus' 
Messianism.  In  this  view  all  becomes  natural  and  in  full  accordance 
Vvdth  the  higher  laws  of  psychodynamics. 

What  a  better  rhetorician  or  even  historian  than  the  Evangelists 
would  have  said  is  that  Jesus  in  calling  the  first  four  disciples  man- 
aged to  impress  them  with  the  idea  that  he  could  teach  them  object- 
lesson-wise  to  draw  crowds  as  he  had  done,  as  if  (in  the  sense  of  Vaihing- 
er's  philosophy  des  ah  oh)  he  were  to  teach  them  where  always  to  find 
shoals  of  fish  awaiting  them.  That  they  had  caught  nothing  all  the 
night  before  was  a  doubly  determined  symbol,  first  of  the  night  pre- 
ceding contrasted  with  the  day  in  which  they  now  were,  symbolized  by 
Jesus'  new  life  and  his  presence;  secondly,  their  utter  failure  to  catch 
anything  typified  their  previous  inabihty  to  impress  themselves  upon 
men.  But  this  was  offset,  thirdly,  by  the  implication  that  under  his 
guidance  they  should  draw  crowds  as  they  had  filled  their  boats  with 
fish.  Thus  we  have  some  insight  as  to  the  inner  motivation  that  im- 
pelled them  on  the  instant  at  his  behest  to  follow  Jesus,  which  the  more 
laconic  First  and  Second  Gospels  do  not  give,  and  we  are  able  to  obviate 
the  vulgarity  and  increase  the  power  for  edification  of  the  incident  if 
taken  literally  and  crassly.  In  this  Jesus  was  more  than  a  clairvoyant 
fish-finder.  If  this  had  been  all,  he  might  have  been  a  god  of  fishermen, 
or  thought  to  be  a  god  of  fishes  themselves.  We  can  perhaps  better 
understand,  if  not  entirely  sympathize  with,  the  marvellous  power 
which  the  fish  symbol  *  x  ^f^^,  as  an  anagram  for  Jesous  Christos  Theou 
Uios  Soter  has.  The  symbol  has  been  overloaded  with  meanings 
hitherto  not  understood  or  explained.  Here  again  it  needed  but  a 
slight  insight  into  the  psychological  laws  that  govern  the  workings  of 


THE  MIRACLES  655 

the  soul  to  save  the  Church  from  ages  of  gross  materiahsm  of  faith 
and  of  taking  purely  natural  psychic  process  for  a  physical  and  sensuous 
prodigy.  If  Jesus'  phrase,  fishers  of  men,  was  aptly  pedagogic  and 
effective  with  these  followers,  it  is  easily  carried  too  far  as  the  Church 

..  has  often  done.  To  fish  for  converts  is  in  no  sense  the  best  trope  for 
bringing  men  to  Christianity.  It  not  only  suggests  Jesuitism  and 
artifice  where  utter  sincerity  and  candour  should  be,  but,  pushed  a  step 
too  far,  breaks  down  as  a  simile,  for  fish  are  not  benefited  but  destroyed 
by  being  caught,  while  men  are  caught  for  their  everlasting  betterment. 
(c)  The  Feeding. — Famine  during  the  Exodus  had  been  relieved 
miraculously  by  manna  and  quails.  In  the  great  drouth  under  Ahab, 
Ehjah  prevented  the  meal  of  his  widowed  hostess  from  wasting  or  her 
oil  from  faihng.  So  when  Elisha's  hundred  disciples  suffered  famine, 
twenty  barley  loaves  and  a  little  crude  corn  were  made  sufficient  by  a 
miracle.  The  supper,  too,  that  Jesus  instituted  the  last  evening  of  his 
life,  consisted  in  the  breaking  and  distribution  of  bread,  and  the  arisen 
Jesus  was  first  recognized  as  he  broke  bread  with  his  disciples  in  the 
same  characteristic  way  as  he  had  done  at  the  sacrament  when  insti- 
tuting the  supper,  which  was  itself  a  counterpart  of  the  feeding  with 

^  manna  and  quails.  The  latter  is  told  twice,  too,  in  the  Old  Testament 
and  so  there  is  a  second  somewhat  diverse  miracle  of  marvellous  feeding 
reported  by  Matthew  and  by  Mark.  In  the  first  the  Twelve  had  just 
returned  from  their  first  mission,  and  Jesus  wished  to  retire  with  them; 
but  crowds  followed,  and  Jesus  taught  and  healed.  But  toward  the 
evening  the  disciples  suggested  that  the  multitude  be  sent  away  out 
of  the  wilderness  to  buy  food  in  the  villages.  Jesus  commanded  to 
feed  them,  and  was  asked  if  the  disciples  should  buy  two  hundred  pence 
worth  of  bread.  Asking  what  provisions  they  had,  he  was  told  five 
barley  loaves  and  two  small  fishes.  He  then  commanded  that  the 
people  be  made  to  sit  on  the  grass  in  an  orderly  way,  took  the  bread, 
blessed  it,  looked  up  to  heaven  and  passed  it  to  the  disciples  to  give 
to  the  multitude.  All  ate  and  were  filled,  and  they  gathered  twelve 
baskets  full  of  fragments.  This  marvel  is  told  by  all  four  of  the  Evan- 
gelists, all  of  whom  agree  on  the  above  figures  and  also  in  the  estimate 
that  there  were  some  five  thousand  people  present. 

In  the  second  miraculous  feeding  (INIatthew  and  IMark  only)  the 
multitude  numbered  four  thousand,  and  had  been  with  Jesus  for  three 
days.    He  had  compassion  upon  them  because  in  the  wilderness  they 


656  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

had  nothing  to  eat.  Seven  loaves  and  a  few  small  fishes  were  all  that 
could  be  found  in  the  larder  of  the  disciples.  Taking  these  viands  and 
giving  thanks,  Jesus  handed  them  to  the  disciples  to  be  distributed. 
All  were  filled,  and  seven  baskets  full  were  gathered  up.  Luke  omits 
this  second  miracle,  and  John  seems  to  compound  the  two.  In  the 
wilderness  Jesus  had  been  tempted  by  hunger,  and  John  makes  Jesus 
ask  Philip,  ''Whence  shall  we  buy  bread  that  these  can  eat?"  to  test  him. 
The  people  after  eating  said,  This  is  of  truth  that  prophet  that  should 
come  into  the  world.  In  the  second  miracle,  too,  Jesus  had  just 
preached  and  healed.  John  is  always  ready  to  modulate  from  the 
literal  to  the  spiritual  aspect  and  vice  versa.  As  for  Hegel  the  real  is 
the  rational  and  the  rational  is  the  real,  so  to  John  all  things  symbolic 
of  higher  meanings  are  real  and  vice  versa.  Barley,  too,  was  the  cheap- 
est bread,  and  fish  the  commonest  food  in  that  region. 

Many  have  asked  when  the  actual  miracle  of  increase  took  place — 
in  the  hands  of  Jesus  during  his  prayer  or  in  the  hands  of  the  disciples  as 
they  distributed  the  food,  or  in  the  hands  or  mouths  of  the  multitude. 
Assuming  the  first  as  most  in  the  spirit  of  the  narrative,  Strauss  asks 
whether  the  loaves  and  fishes  were  multipHed  in  number  as  they  came 
one  after  another  from  Jesus'  hand,  or  whether  each  loaf  grew  to  satisfy 
one  fifth  of  the  multitude  and  to  supply  two  and  four  tenths  of  the 
twelve  baskets  of  fragments.  Here  expositors  vie  with  one  another  in 
shifts  and  evasions  to  rid  themselves  of  so  embarrassing  a  miracle  or 
to  make  it  more  palatable  to  faith.  Did  the  people  follow  Jesus,  not 
to  hear  him  or  even  to  be  healed,  but  rather  to  be  fed  in  a  bread-line? 
Did  they  know  of  the  miracle,  or  think  Jesus  a  generous  almoner  of 
food  that  he  had  provided  himself?  Only  John  suggests  that  they 
knew;  and  would  it  not  have  been  wiser  on  Jesus'  part  to  let  them 
know?  Perhaps  he  gave  a  hospitable  lunch  which  was  afterward 
conceived  as  supernatural. 

Finally,  the  fact  that  the  fragments  are  gathered  with  care  that 
nothing  be  left  suggests  more  than  economy,  for  the  early  Church 
held  that  the  loss  of  the  smallest  fragment  of  the  eucharistic  body  of 
Our  Lord  was  almost  sacrilege.  Twelve  baskets  would  be  one  for 
each  disciple,  and  the  seven  baskets  in  the  second  feeding  may  have 
been  suggested  by  the  number  of  loaves  which  were  on  hand,  or  of  the 
seven  deacons  that  served  the  sacred  elements  in  the  early  agapce. 

This  miracle  involves  nothing  less  than  the  creation  of  food.    The 


THE  MIRACLES  657 

supply  is  increased  about  a  thousandfold.  The  grain,  and  perhaps 
fish,  came  into  existence  on  the  spot  and  at  a  moment,  ready  cooked. 
The  conventional  exegetes  have  long  had  recourse  to  their  favourite 
phrase  of  accelerated  processes  by  the  Lord,  to  whom  a  thousand  years 
are  as  one  day.  But  he  also  established  seed-time  and  harvest.  He 
might  create  a  new  world,  but  to  abrogate  his  own  laws  imphes  that 
they  were  inadequate  to  support  the  higher  spiritual  development  in 
the  new  order  of  things.  Moreover,  Jesus  had  refused  to  make  stone 
into  bread  for  himself,  and  why  should  he  do  it  for  others?  This 
miracle  is  plainly  a  rough-hewn  allegory  of  heavenly  bread  or  treasure 
that  grows  by  being  spent,  and  we  must  not  substitute  the  letter  for 
the  spirit.  Jesus  would  lift  men  above  the  sense  of  hunger  or  ap- 
petite generally.  Some  have  suggested  that  in  the  crowd  were  those 
who  had  a  surplus  of  food,  and  that  they  were  moved  by  hospitality 
or  brotherly  love  to  forget  social  barriers  and  share  their  store  with 
others.  Fellowship  may  not  satisfy  hunger,  but  it  may  make  men 
forget  it.  Very  common  is  the  suggestion  that  Jesus  fed  the  souls 
of  his  hearers  so  full  of  heavenly  bread  by  his  teaching  that  physical 
hunger  was  forgotten,  and  his  slender  stores  of  food  were  not  eaten 
but  merely  broken.  Keim  figures  that  Jesus'  achievement  here  was 
two  hundred  times  greater  than  that  of  Elisha,  who  fed  one  hundred 
sons  of  the  prophets  on  twenty  barley  loaves,  for  here  five  thousand 
were  fed  with  five. 

(d)  Tempest. — In  one  thrice-told  tale  it  was  decided  to  cross  the 
Lake  of  Galilee,  and  after  they  had  put  out  there  was  a  great  storm  that 
seemed  about  to  swamp  the  ship,  while  Jesus  lay  in  the  stern  asleep 
on  a  pillow.  The  disciples  awoke  him,  asking  him  whether  he  cared  not 
if  they  perished,  and  called  upon  him  to  save  them.  He  ascribed  their 
fear  to  lack  of  faith,  and  then  rebuked  the  winds  and  raging  waves 
saying.  Peace,  be  still,  and  there  was  a  great  calm.  The  people  feared 
and  marvelled,  asking  one  another  what  manner  of  man  he  was  that 
winds  and  waves  obeyed  him. 

In  what  is  apparently  another  incident,  told  by  all  four  of  the 
Evangelists,  Jesus  sent  the  disciples  across  the  same  Lake  of  Galilee 
while  he  remained  behind  to  send  the  multitude  away,  and  then 
retired  to  pray,  John  says  to  escape  being  made  a  king  by  force.  By 
evening  the  ship  was  in  the  midst  of  the  lake  and  tossed  by  angry  bil- 
lows, and  in  the  fourth  watch  of  the  night  when,  John  says,  they  were 


658  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

twenty-five  or  thirty  leagues  off  shore,  they  saw  Jesus  walking  toward 
them  on  the  water,  and  Mark  says  they  thought  he  was  a  ghost. 
To  calm  their  new  terror  he  called  out,  It  is  I,  be  not  afraid;  although 
one  report  says  he  made  at  first  as  though  he  would  go  by.  Peter  said, 
If  it  is  thou,  caU  me  to  come  to  thee,  and  he  was  called  to  come;  but 
after  starting  he  became  afraid  and  began  to  sink,  crying.  Lord,  save 
me.  Then  Jesus  caught  him  by  the  hand,  rebuked  his  doubt,  and  both 
entered  the  ship,  and  the  wind  ceased  although  John  says,  "Im- 
mediately the  ship  was  at  the  land  whither  they  went"  as  if  it  were 
miraculously  transported  over  the  twenty-five  or  thirty  leagues,  and 
that  the  people  glorified  him  as  the  Son  of  God.  Mark  says:  "They 
considered  not  the  miracle  of  the  loaves;  for  their  hearts  were  hard- 
ened." When  they  had  landed,  all  the  sick  in  the  villages  and  coun- 
try and  the  cities  round  about  were  brought,  and  as  many  as  touched 
even  the  hem  of  his  garment  were  made  whole. 

In  the  first  incident  Jesus'  sleep  after  a  hard  day's  work  brings  into 
effective  contrast  divine  repose  and  the  distress  of  earth.  When  called 
in  panic  and  extremity,  both  wind  and  wave  sank  to  peace  as  if  bowed 
by  his  presence  and  rebuke.  He  did  not  pray,  but  commanded  as  God 
did  of  old  the  waters  of  the  Red  Sea.  He  had  a  control  no  less  than 
magical  over  both  raging  elements  and  perturbed  souls.  In  the  other 
lake  tale  INiark  makes  Jesus  about  to  pass  by  as  a  stranger,  as  if  he  had 
not  seen  or  thought  of  the  ship;  but  he  responded  to  a  call  to  com.e 
aboard,  whereupon  the  wind  ceased  of  itself  without  command,  as  if  in 
obedience  to  his  unspoken  wish,  although  he  had  apparently  not 
smoothed  his  own  path  over  the  rough  waves,  upon  which  his  footing 
must  have  been  most  precarious.  Here  Jesus  is  not  asleep,  but  absent, 
and  the  implication  is  that  had  he  been  awake  or  present  the  elements 
would  not  have  broken  forth  from  their  bounds.  As  to  Peter's  venture, 
some  think  it  a  later  and  spurious  interpolation.  Lange  curiously 
accommodates  by  saying  that  Peter  "was  perhaps  a  high- water 
treader,"  but  that  the  waves  were  so  high  they  compelled  him  to  swim 
and  finally  threatened  to  submerge  him.  Oelshausen  thinlcs  Jesus' 
water  walking  was  a  case  of  levitation  or  rarefaction  of  the  body, 
and  that  the  incident  favours  Docetism,  or  that  his  corporeal  nature 
had  already  begun  to  undergo  progressive  etherization.  Paulus  says 
that  probably  the  disciples  falsely  thought  they  saw  him.  Venturini 
suggests    that    Jesus    was    really   on   shore,    and   in   the   dawn   or 


THE  MIRACLES  659 

mist  and  fog  which  enwrapped  him  he  seemed  to  be  out  at  sea.  This 
is  favoured  by  John's  account  of  the  speedy  landing,  and  so  we  are 
told  Jesus  really  drew  Peter  out  of  the  shallow  water  in  which  he  was 
floundering  and  wading  very  near  the  shore. 

These  scenic  miracles  have  many  parallels,  ancient  and  modern, 
like  the  Philopedes  who  ran  over  the  green  /Egea,n  Sea  with  cork-shod 
feet,  escorting  ships  far  out  to  sea.  There  are  also  many  Old  Testa- 
ment parallels.  In  Psalm  107  the  restoration  from  captivity  is  de- 
scribed as  a  sailor  brought  to  land  from  a  tempest.  Yahveh  raised  a 
strong  wind,  and  they  cried  to  the  Lord,  and  he  saved  them.  So  Jesus 
is  made  to  factuaHze  this  symbolic  imagery.  Hengstenberg  thinks 
that  thus  insights  suggested  by  ancient  writers  were  often  realized, 
rather  than  that  this  realization  was  never  effected  at  all  by  Jesus  but 
fictitiously  ascribed  to  him  later.  The  figure  of  the  tempest  soon  came 
to  refer  predominantly  not  to  ancient  days  but  to  the  tribulations  of 
the  early  Church,  and  even  if  there  were  no  nuclear  incident,  some  such 
tale  was  likely  to  be  told  of  Jesus  because  of  its  tropical  value.  "The 
Lord  makes  a  way  on  the  sea,  a  path  in  the  mighty  waters,"  and  Job 
said,  "  he  walks  upon  the  sea  as  on  a  floor."  He  calms  perturbed  minds, 
comes  to  his  friends  in  their  hour  of  need.  In  a  sharper  and  more 
acuminated  way  he  helps  on  the  instant  the  failing  faith  of  one  who 
with  characteristic  sudden  impulsiveness  essayed  more  than  he  could 
accomplish,  and  this  is  a  sweet  assurance  that  comes  home  to  the  heart. 
Socrates  had  taught  that  no  real  evil  could  befall  the  good  man,  living  or 
dead;  but  Jesus  here  shows  himself  a  very  present  personal  help  in  time 
of  trouble.  If  the  embodiment  of  this  fond  hope  and  wish  were  couched 
in  even  more  impossible  terms  it  would  have  been  too  precious  to  be 
sloughed  off  or  thrown  into  the  rubbish  heap  of  vulgar  superstition. 

The  heuristic  meat  most  often  found  here  is  in  Peter's  venture, 
his  failure  and  rescue,  which  Goethe  thought  a  beautiful  illustration 
of  the  fact  that  man  succeeds  in  desperate  undertakings  if  only  he 
has  faith  and  courage,  while  if  he  lacks  confidence  he  fails.  Again,  it 
teaches  that  man's  extremity  is  God's  opportunity.  Something  like 
this  is  the  only  moral  haec  fabida  docet.  We  also  see  how  inferior 
Jesus  is  to  Yahveh  in  controlling  nature,  as  he  is  superior  to  him  in 
deaUng  with  human  affairs.  Jesus  does  not  bring  storm  and  rain, 
stop  the  sun,  control  thunder,  cleave  the  sea,  shake  the  earth,  bring 
floods,  but  his  domain  is  the  body  and  soul  cf  man. 


66o  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

Davies^  makes  forty-six  miracles,  but  fourteen  of  these  are  allusions 
found  in  one  or  more  of  the  Gospels  where  various  cures  are  asserted, 
but  which  he  thinks  refer  to  at  least  fourteen  groups  of  more  or  less 
miscellaneous  healing,  and  there  are  many  phrases  indicating  that  very 
large  numbers  had  been  cured.  "  He  healed  all  that  were  sick."  "  He 
healed  many  that  were  sick  of  divers  diseases."  They  brought  the 
sick  to  him  and  "  he  laid  his  hands  on  every  one  of  them  and  healed 
them."  "Devils  also  came  out  of  many,  crying  out."  He  went 
through  all  Galilee,  preaching  and  casting  out  devils.  "Healing 
all  manner  of  disease."  "The  whole  multitude  sought  to  touch  him: 
for  there  went  virtue  out  of  him  and  healed  them  all."  "  They  brought 
unto  him  all  sick  people  that  were  taken  with  divers  diseases  and 
torments,  and  those  which  were  possessed  with  devils,  and  those  which 
were  lunatic  and  those  that  had  the  palsy;  and  he  healed  them."  He 
cured  many  of  their  infirmities  and  plagues,  and  of  evil  spirits;  and 
unto  many  that  were  bhnd  he  gave  sight.  "  And  Jesus  went  about  all 
Galilee  teaching  in  their  synagogues  and  preaching  the  Gospel  of  the 
Kingdom,  and  healing  all  manner  of  sickness  and  all  manner  of  dis- 
ease." "Healed  them  that  had  need  of  healing."  "They  brought 
unto  him  all  that  were  diseased,  and  besought  him  that  they  might 
only  touch  the  hem  of  his  garment:  and  as  many  as  touched  were 
made  perfectly  whole."  "And  great  multitudes  came  unto  him  hav- 
ing with  them  those  that  were  lame,  bhnd,  dumb,  maimed,  and  many 
others,  and  cast  them  down  at  Jesus'  feet;  and  he  healed  them." 

These  general  statements  concerning  many  miracles  are  all  of 
healing  and  none  of  nature  wonders,  and  the  query  arises  why  if  Jesus 
cured  so  many  on  what  principle  it  was  that  those  above  more  circum- 
stantially described  were  singled  out  from  the  others. 

The  impression  made  by  Jesus'  miracles  on  those  who  were  eye- 
witnesses to  them  was  very  diverse.  As  to  the  disciples,  at  the  draught 
of  fishes  Peter  was  profoundly  awed,  crying,  "  Depart  from  me  for  I  am 
a  sinful  man,"  and  to  him  and  the  other  three  disciples  then  chosen, 
who  seemed  to  have  accepted  their  call  because  of  the  impression  this 
wonder  made  on  them,  Jesus  said,  "Fear  not."  John  said  that  the 
disciples  believed  in  him  at  and  after  the  Cana  miracle.  They  seem 
soon  to  expect  healing  miracles  and  to  accept  them  almost  as  a  matter 
of  course,  and  were  more  inclined  to  bring  Jesus  and  his  patients 

i"The  Miracles  of  Jeuu."    London,  igij,  040  P> 


THE  MIRACLES  66i 

together  than  to  protect  him  from  their  importunity.  In  healing 
they  seem  to  have  regarded  themselves  as  in  a  sense  apprentices  to 
the  art,  and  Jesus  as  their  master.  In  stilling  the  tempest  they  were 
rebuked  for  faithlessness,  and  when  he  came  to  them  walking  on 
the  water  they  feared  again,  and,  Matthew  said,  confessed  him  to  be 
the  Son  of  God;  and  Mark,  that  their  hearts  were  hardened  and  that 
they  had  not  considered  the  miracle  of  the  loaves.  This  suggests 
that  the  disciples  were  not  inchned  to  believe  but  rather  to  doubt  the 
nature  miracles,  or  at  least  that  they  were  not  wonted  to  them.  They 
had  no  intimation  beforehand  that  he  could  or  would  raise  Lazarus, 
and  when  told  of  the  reports  of  Jesus'  own  Resurrection  thought  them 
idle  tales.  On  the  whole,  it  appears  that  the  disciples,  while  expecting 
him  to  perform  certain  cures,  emulated  his  power  to  do  so.  By  the 
nature  and  resuscitation  miracles  they  were  amazed,  but  far  from 
being  convinced  that  he  was  divine  because  of  them.  Nor  did  they 
ever  attempt  to  emulate  him  in  performing  these  except  in  the  case 
of  Peter's  walking  on  the  water.  Thus  the  Evangelists  have  not  made 
the  disciples  react  to  these  greater  marvels  as  normal  human  nature 
should  and  must,  and  this  constitutes  another  source  of  doubt  whether 
they  ever  occurred  or  were  really  seen  by  the  disciples.  They  were 
later  completely  convinced,  though  gradually  and  in  stages,  that  Jesus 
had  arisen;  but  the  raising  of  Lazarus  and  the  nature  wonders  left  no 
trace  on  their  lives  such  as  they  must  have  done  had  they  really  oc- 
curred. They  never  expected  them  beforehand,  and  never  believed 
in  them  later,  because  they  never  saw  them. 

As  to  the  patients^  those  healed  at  a  distance  seem  not  to  have 
known  that  Jesus  had  anything  to  do  with  their  cure.  Those  resur- 
rected seemed  dazed,  but  we  are  told  almost  nothing  of  them  after  their 
resuscitation.  Some  of  those  healed  went  their  way  without  even  giving 
thanks,  while  others  overwhelmed  him  with  gratitude  and  some  desired 
to  become  his  followers.  It  was  the  demoniac  who  first  of  all  and  un- 
reservedly confessed  and  proclaimed  him  divine.  John's  congenital 
blind  man  courageously  protested  Jesus'  power,  braving  even  the 
Pharisees  to  do  so.  Some  of  the  sick  had  most  earnestly  entreated  him 
to  cure  them,  while  the  demoniacs  most  violently  resisted  cure.  Some 
had  indomitable  faith,  and  some  none.  The  friends  and  relatives  of 
those  cured  were  most  uniformly  true  to  human  nature  in  their  conduct. 

It  would  seem  that  Jesus  would  have  the  warmest  of  all  places  in 


662  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

the  hearts  of  those  he  healed.  To  their  cure  his  fame  among  the  popu- 
lace was  chiefly  due.  But  even  the  friends  of  those  to  whom  he  gratu- 
itously dispensed  physical  salvation  have  left  no  very  tangible  token  of 
gratitude,  and  seem  to  have  made  no  offerings,  although  some  seem  to 
have  spent  their  substance  on  other  healers,  and  none  of  the  latter 
appeared  desirous  of  learning  the  potent  secret  of  the  Great  Physician. 
These  patients  restored  to  health  must,  according  to  the  Gospel  impli- 
cation, have  been  very  many.  They  and  their  relatives  were  among 
the  first  and  most  ardent  believers,  but  little  influence  seems  ever 
to  have  emanated  from  them  in  Jesus'  behalf  even  in  his  hours  of  trial. 
Had  they  numbered  hundreds  or  thousands,  it  would  seem  that  they 
and  the  multitude  of  those  who  had  seen  and  known  of  the  cures  must 
have  constituted  an  element  of  more  influence  upon  Jesus'  life  than  we 
are  told  they  had.  Mary  Magdalene,  out  of  whom  seven  devils  were 
cast,  seems  to  have  yielded  with  abandon  to  the  sentiment  of  gratitude 
and  love  to  a  degree  that  illustrates  the  Freudian  "transfer."  But 
many  of  those,  like,  e.  g.,  the  nine  lepers,  seem  to  have  gone  their  way 
as  if  desiring  to  have  their  disease  and  its  cure  forgotten.  No  others 
who  had  convalesced  under  his  influence  were  in  his  train  of  followers. 
Nor  did  he  choose  those  who  had  been  rescued  from  a  sinful  Hfe  by  a 
great  salvation.  In  Paul's  life  and  teaching  healing  played  little  more 
than  a  metaphorical  role,  nor  in  the  patristic  writers  does  it  loom  up  as 
in  the  Evangelists.  All  these  considerations  indicate  again  that  it  was 
exaggerated. 

As  for  the  scribes  and  Pharisees,  who  were  often  present  or  told 
afterward  (as  in  the  case  of  Lazarus  and  elsewhere),  they  were  never 
convinced  but  jealous  and  enraged,  and  the  more  manifest  the  miracu- 
lous power  the  more  they  sought  to  destroy  Jesus.  From  the  accom- 
plishment of  this  their  chief  end  they  were  restrained  by  fear  because 
the  people  favoured  Jesus  while  they  censured  him,  not  because  he  had 
healed,  but  because  he  had  healed  on  the  Sabbath  day,  and  again  be- 
cause he  had  arrogated  to  himself  divine  power  by  forgiving  sins.  The 
scribes,  Pharisees,  priests,  and  elders,  these  were  his  implacable  enemies 
seeking  to  entangle  him  in  his  words,  to  incite  the  people  against  him, 
and  to  take  him  by  craft.  Their  attitude  was  that  he  was  an  impostor 
and  pretender.  Renan  thinks  it  was  their  machinations  that  really 
checked  Jesus'  career  prematurely.  They  bargained  with  Iscariot, 
accused  him,  sent  officers  to  arrest  him,  suborned  false  witnesses, 


THE  MIRACLES  663 

testified  him  to  Pilate,  taunted  him  on  the  cross,  bribed  the  soldiers  to 
say  that  his  body  had  been  stolen.  He  was  followed  by  their  implac- 
able hate  from  first  to  last,  and  while  accepting  some  of  his  cures  they 
explained  them  by  assuming  him  to  be  in  league  with  the  devil.  Thus 
they,  at  least,  were  convinced  of  no  other  miracles  than  these  which  by 
imphcation  they  did  admit  in  certain  cases,  and  which  they,  too,  had 
some  power  to  do. 

Apologists  for  the  Jewish  hierarchy  urge  that  its  rancour  has  been 
exaggerated,  especially  in  the  early  part  of  Jesus'  career,  and  that  he 
was  comparatively  unknown  at  Jerusalem,  entering  that  city  only  near 
the  close  of  his  ministry;  that  his  fame  was  chiefly  Galilean,  and  that  it 
was  the  gentile  propaganda  of  Paul  that  intensified  opposition  and 
made  an  atmosphere  in  which  every  divergence  that  arose  later  was 
put  back  into  Jesus'  lifetime  and  exaggerated.  According  to  this  view, 
the  Gospels  do  injustice  to  the  representatives  of  Jewish  orthodoxy 
by  seeking  to  magnify  Jesus'  influence  and  make  it  far  more  formidable 
than  it  became  during  his  life.  We  are  told  that  the  acclaim  of  his 
entrance  into  Jerusalem  and  the  attention  he  received  there  were  exag- 
gerated, and  also  that  there  were  real  grounds  in  his  teaching  and  deeds 
for  accusing  him  of  sedition;  while  his  caustic  and  unpolitic  vitupera- 
tions made  him  seem  not  only  a  heretic  but  a  fanatic  to  impartial 
minds  in  the  holy  city,  who  knew  him  only  from  without,  and  saw 
chiefly  his  unique  genius  for  making  enemies,  which  Pilate  quite  failed 
to  understand.  Jesus'  torrid  outbursts  of  indignation,  the  impreca- 
tions expressed  in  the  woes  he  launched,  awful  as  the  curse  of  Rome  by 
Richelieu  or  the  excommunication  formula  of  the  synagogue  hurled 
later  against  Spinoza — these  it  was  not  in  human  nature  to  endure. 
Hence  his  death  was  even  more  inevitable  than  that  of  Socrates,  and 
the  misrepresentation  of  him  by  his  enemies  was  more  exaggerated 
than  that  of  Socrates  by  the  sophists,  whom  the  later  historians  of 
Greek  philosophy  have  done  much  to  reinstate  without  thereby  dim- 
ming the  lustre  of  the  great  hebamic  artist  of  ancient  Athens.  Jesus, 
although  he  made  no  such  apology  as  Socrates  did,  claiming  that  in- 
stead of  death  he  should  be  supported  by  a  pension,  nevertheless 
deemed  himself  as  good  a  citizen  as  Socrates  did.  Surely,  Jesus,  black 
as  he  is  made  to  have  painted  these  villains  in  the  drama  of  his  hfe, 
would  never  have  sanctioned  the  way  or  degree  in  which  his  persecutors 
and  their  descendants  have  become  the  persecuted  during  the  Christian 


664  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

centuries.  How  could  a  Jewish  Messiah,  the  proclaimer  of  the  gospel 
of  love,  have  foreseen,  much  less  have  left  behind  him,  this  legacy  of 
hate  instead? 

Finally,  the  multitude  generally  present,  like  the  chorus  of  the 
old  Greek  tragedy,  performed  a  not  very  dissimilar  function.  They 
were  amazed,  murmured,  believed,  praised  God,  acknowledged  Jesus 
to  be  his  Son,  and  were  generally  favourable  and  prone  to  believe, 
though  sometimes  divided  in  opinion  and  also  eager  to  profit  by  being 
fed  or  having  their  friends  cured. 

They  are  not  only  less  often  present,  but  are  less  responsive,  and 
their  reactions  were  less  natural  perhaps,  or  merely  conventional,  even 
in  the  presence  of  the  most  stupendous  wonders,  to  which  the  recorded 
responses  are  not  unlike  those  evoked  by  marvels  within  the  range  of 
possible  psychotherapy.  In  general,  the  more  inexplicable  the  prodigy, 
the  less  the  number  of  those  who  saw  it  or  the  less  they  said  about  it, 
suggesting  that  they  were  impressionable  sensation  seekers  to  whom  the 
Great  Healer  was  only  a  transient  object  of  fickle  curiosity,  without 
dreaming  of  the  higher  spiritual  meanings  of  which  the  miracles  were 
symbols.  Else  why  were  these  regions  where  Jesus  did  most  of  his 
mightiest  works  and  where  the  new  Gospel  was  preached,  of  which  he 
was  the  centre,  not  those  most  favourable  for  his  doctrine  to  take 
quickest  and  deepest  root?  Why  was  this  not  the  ground  chosen  for 
the  first  and  most  effective  preaching  after  Pentecost?  Common  sense 
would  surely  indicate  that  this  would  be  the  richest  soil,  for  here  per- 
sonal reminiscences  of  Jesus  and  the  best  things  he  said  and  did  were 
freshest.  This  would  certainly  seem  to  have  constituted  a  unique 
field  for  a  propaganda,  but  it  seems  to  a  great  extent  to  have  been 
unutilized  and  left  to  go  to  waste.  The  seed  Jesus  planted  here  was 
unharvested.  This  again  suggests  that  there  may  have  been  an  exag- 
geration of  marvels. 

In  the  cure  of  the  blind  man,  the  leper,  the  raising  of  Jairus's 
daughter,  the  Transfiguration,  etc.,  secrecy  is  enjoined,  but  usually 
in  vain,  while  some  patients  are  taken  apart  as  if  to  prevent  publicity. 
But  the  injunction  to  secrecy  is  never  said  to  have  been  observed,  and 
in  the  case  of  some  of  the  lesser,  and  even  the  greater,  miracles  like 
walking  on  the  water  and  raising  Lazarus,  no  such  injunction  is  re- 
corded. Many  miracles  are  done  before  the  multitude,  as  all  should 
have  been  if  they  were  chiefly  credentials  of  Messianity;  and  there  is  no 


THE  MIRACLES  665 

more  reason  or  consistency  among  the  di£ferent  wonders  in  Jesus* 
seeking  or  avoiding  publicity  than  in  his  now  wishing  and  now  being 
reluctant  to  do  miracles.  Many  motives  for  enjoining  silence  have 
been  conjectured,  viz.,  Jesus'  mortification  at  having  to  validate 
himself,  his  word,  and  his  work  in  this  way  when  he  desired  to  do  so  by 
his  doctrine  chiefly  or  alone.  Again,  he  may  have  objected  because 
he  saw  that  his  wonders  were  being  used  as  advertisements  and  drew 
crowds  excessively  large  which  made  too  great  drafts  upon  his  time 
and  energy.  Again,  it  may  have  been  due  to  a  wish  on  his  part  to 
reserve  some  miracles  to  the  narrower  and  more  esoteric  circle  of  his 
disciples  and  friends,  and  that  he  thus  made  a  distinction  between  the 
mass  of  spectators  and  the  acolytes  closest  to  him.  Again,  it  has  been 
ascribed  to  a  desire  not  to  offend  the  Pharisees  too  greatly  or  prema- 
tiurely,  since  these  seemed  especially  to  exasperate  them.  Again,  we 
might  assume  that  they  were  really  natural  though  striking  deeds  of  a 
kind  which,  he  feared,  if  told  and  retold  generally,  would  grow  into 
supernatural  events,  and  that  he  had  a  penetrating  intuition  that  in  his 
social  environment  he  was  in  grave  danger  of  what  he  abhorred,  viz., 
being  regarded  as  a  breaker  or  suspender  of  natural  laws,  thus  antici- 
pating and  seeking  to  prevent  just  the  fate  that  he  suffered.  On  this 
latter  view,  Jesus  forbade  gossip  when  he  thought  it  would  lead  to  an 
exaggeration  which  would  become  eventually  untruth.  Again,  to-day 
it  is  often  the  patient  who  wishes  the  doctor  to  be  silent  about  his 
trouble  and  its  cure,  but  there  is  no  intimation  that  Jesus  desired  his 
cures  concealed  in  the  interests  of  the  patient.  Nor  was  it  that  he  had 
private  methods  or  remedies,  as  Paulus  suggested,  such  as  would  to-day 
be  patentable,  and  which  he  desired  to  keep  to  himself  and  to  his  disci- 
ples. 

If  the  Evangelists  had  a  subconscious  sense  that  they  were  mis- 
representing what  their  master  really  did,  then  their  dim  compunction 
might  well  express  and  also  ease  itself  by  representing  Jesus  as  forbid- 
ding that  it  be  told  at  all,  knowing  in  their  own  hearts  that  he  would 
not  have  sanctioned  their  mode  of  telling  it.  Thus  they  tended  to 
atone  for  the  injustice  their  inmost  conscience  felt  they  were  doing  him 
while  telling  what,  to  them,  was  an  improvement  on  the  exact  historic 
truth.  Moreover,  by  assigning  this  dread  of  pubUcity  to  Jesus  more 
colour  was  given  to  their  intimation  that  there  were  many  other 
unreported  miracles  concerning  which  his  injunction  of  silence  had 


666  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

been  observed.  If  knowledge  of  some  of  these  leaked  out  despite  his 
wish,  surely  the  latter  would  be  effective  in  the  case  of  other  of  his 
marvellous  doings.  In  fact,  though  he  did  nothing  to  merit  the  fame  of 
the  thaumaturgist  and  was  both  unable  and  unwilling  to  do  anything 
to  bring  this  fame  upon  himself,  he  knew  his  clientele,  and  that  the 
prochvities  of  his  age  were  in  this  direction.  He  had  a  haunting  dread 
that  he  would  be  misconceived  and  misrepresented  just  here,  and  this 
feeling  on  his  part  is  reflected  to  us  in  the  Evangehsts  under  the  dis- 
guised form  of  representing  him  as  trying  to  keep  real  miracles  secret. 

From  this  new  angle  of  approach,  therefore,  indications  seem  to 
converge  to  the  conclusion  that  Jesus  did  heal  certain  neuropaths  and 
psychopaths  who  abounded  about  him,  and  also  that  his  rarely  im- 
pressive personality,  backed  by  great  local  fame,  caused  at  least  tem- 
porary betterment  in  some  cases  of  other  kinds.  We  see  modern  con- 
firmations of  this  in  vulgar  contemporary  healers  like  Slater,  Dowie, 
and  even  in  the  occasional  successes  of  the  most  arrant  and  knavish 
medical  quacks  and  charlatans,  in  which  scientific  psychology  is  finding 
rich  new  material,  while  the  higher  forms  of  faith-  and  mind-cure  also 
tend  to  bring  such  cases  within  the  range  of  natural  law  and  to  save 
them  from  wholesale  rejection  as  superstitious.  On  the  other  hand, 
these  selfsame  modern  instances  teach  us  how  very  slight  and  transient 
betterments  of  this  kind  tend  almost  inevitably  to  grow  in  the  mind 
of  the  patient,  and  also  by  being  told  and  retold,  to  grow  into  marvels 
that  are  preposterous  and  absurd,  and  how  readily  a  mole-hill  may  be- 
come a  mountain  and  credulity  make  a  grain  of  mustard  seed  into  a 
great  tree.  Not  only  were  there,  in  fact,  no  other  mighty  works  save 
these  heahngs  done  by  Jesus,  but,  as  we  saw  above,  the  surfaces  of 
cleavage  between  them  and  all  the  other  spurious  wonder  tales  are  still 
traceable.  The  disciples  could  heal  in  modo  fnagislri,  but  were  directed, 
were  able,  and  wished,  to  do  no  other  miracle.  The  physical  marvels 
of  the  Old  Testament  order  died  out  with  Jesus.  The  fact  that  the 
disciples  cured,  marvellously  invalidated  these  cures  of  Jesus  as  proofs 
of  his  Messianity,  and  therefore  the  Evangelists  had  to  stress  those 
of  other  kinds,  or  else  Jesus  could  no  longer  be  thought  divine  be- 
cause of  his  supernatural  power.  Unless  he  outdid  his  disciples, 
they  were  as  divine  as  he  so  far  as  the  range  of  this  kind  of  attestation 
went.  Had  the  disciples  not  developed  some  of  his  power  to  heal, 
therefore,  one  motive  of  representing  Jesus  as  outdoing  them  and  pass- 


THE  MIRACLES  667 

ing  beyond  the  realm  of  what  is  possible  to  man  would  have  been  ab- 
sent. Again,  as  we  saw  above,  the  really  supernatural  doings  of  Jesus 
either  left  no  traces  on  the  minds  and  hearts  of  his  disciples  or  else 
caused  fear  and  aversion,  the  diametrical  opposite  of  the  effect  the 
normal  cures  made  upon  them;  and  only  in  the  age  of  the  Evangelists, 
and  by  them,  was  the  attitude  of  the  disciples  toward  the  superhuman 
achievements  of  Jesus  reversed.  The  stone  the  disciples  rejected 
became  to  the  Evangelists  the  chief  stone  of  the  corner.^ 

Thus,  to  summarize,  geneticism  gives  us  a  new  interpretation  of 
the  miracles  of  Jesus  which,  while  accepting  all  the  negative  results 
of  antisupernatural  criticism,  at  the  same  time  gives  them  a  novel 
and  precious  significance,  and  invests  them  with  a  value  even  greater 
than  they  held  before.  As  objective  facts  capable  of  cinematographic 
reproduction  they  are  one  and  all  (save  only  certain  cases  of  curing  or 
bettering  certain  types  of  disease,  to  which  we  have  modern  parallels) 
as  false  to  both  nature  and  history  as  hippogriffs,  centaurs,  phoenixes, 
or  the  most  fantastic  exploits  of  the  denizens  of  Olympus  or  Walhalla. 
In  the  literal  sense  in  which  the  synoptists  record  and  orthodoxy  ac- 
cepts them,  they  are  as  untrue  as  dreams  or  hallucinations,  and  would 
have  been  no  less  abhorrent  to  Jesus  than  was  the  formal  sanctimoni- 
ousness or  the  hypocritical  piety  against  which  he  launched  his  most 
impassioned  invectives.  How  he  shrank  from  the  reputation  of  a 
thaumaturgist  even  the  Gospel  writers  who  invested  him  with  it  did 
not  have  the  wit  to  disguise,  but  involuntarily  betray  it  to  us  in  their 
recitals,  as  we  have  seen. 

Again,  miracles  have  never  been  entirely  assimilated  by  the 
Christian  consciousness,  but  have  remained  as  foreign  bodies  in  it, 
perhaps  more  or  less  encysted  in  its  system  of  doctrine.  They  have 
always  necessitated  a  double  housekeeping  and  more  or  less  dualization 
of  mind.  Over  against  a  world  of  reason  and  science  based  on  the 
senses,  they  require  as  a  postulate  another  order  of  things  with  its 
own  organ,  faith,  which  is  created  for  their  special  conservation. 
WTiere  natural  and  supernatural  impinge  or  collide,  the  latter  is  su- 
preme. We  have  to  pass  from  the  cosmos  to  an  epicosmic  world,  and 
between  the  two  we  must  evolve  a  watertight  compartment,  building 
a  coffer-dam,  as  it  were,  about  certain  articles  of  faith  which  the 


1  See  J.  R.  Illingworth:  "The  Gospel  Miracles,"  lois.  ai3  P-;  H.  Huelster:  "Miracles  in  the  Light  of  Science  and 
History,"  iotj,  164  p.;  D.  M.  Rarlc:  "Das  ReligiSse  Wuiider.  iS^g,  87,  p.;  J.  M.Thompson:  "Miracles  in  the  New 
Testament,"  1911,  236  p.    Also  A.  Harnack:  "Die  Apostelgcschichte,"  1908,  p.  398. 


668  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

mediaeval  Church  expUcitly,  and  we  implicitly,  reserve  as  taboo  to 
reason.  A  large  part  of  the  entire  history  of  Christian  thought  has 
consisted  of  reciprocal  claims,  concessions,  accommodations,  as  be- 
tween these  two  views  of  the  world,  and  the  rivalry,  hate,  persecution, 
and  mutual  outlawry  of  their  partisans  still  subsist.  Yet  even  more 
tragic,  perhaps,  is  the  schizophrenia  caused  by  these  two  trends  that 
exists  in  so  many  indiv  dual  souls.  The  very  bitterness  of  the  cham- 
pions of  ultra-conservatism  in  religion  is  due  to  the  fact  that  they 
themselves  feel  heretical  promptings  in  the  depths  of  their  souls.  In 
letting  loose  the  odium  theologicum  against  skeptics  they  are  really 
seeking  to  suppress  by  force  nascent  doubts  in  themselves.  The 
apostles  of  science,  on  the  other  hand,  in  pouring  out  the  vials  of  their 
scorn  upon  believers  have  also  done  violence  to  their  own  souls  and 
have  come  to  falsely  think  themselves  irrehgious  when,  in  fact,  an 
undevout  scientist,  who  spends  his  life  in  thinking  God's  thoughts 
after  him  in  the  world  of  nature  and  mind,  would  be,  as  the  proverb 
has  it,  mad  if  he  were  really  undevout. 

To  this  tragic  schism  or  bifurcation  of  the  soul  geneticism  comes 
as  a  mediator  and  unifier,  accepting  all  real  affirmations  of  both  parties 
and  ignoring  only  their  negations.  Both  are  right,  and  each  is  a  con- 
servator of  the  truth,  but  in  different  ways.  The  error  of  both  is  lack 
of  insight  into  the  nature  of  the  human  soul.  Genetic  analytic  psy- 
chology comes  forward  as  a  reconciler,  doing  justice  to  both  sides  and 
violence  to  neither,  and  asserting  even  for  miracles  and  before  the 
tribunal  of  science,  a  new  and  higher  value,  while  at  the  same  time 
denying  to  them  every  vestige  of  objective  reality.  On  what  ground 
do  we  base  this  great  and  paradoxical  claim? 

The  answer  to  this  question  is  found  in  a  transforming  conception 
of  the  nature  and  functioning  of  the  soul  itself.  As  long  as  it  was 
conceived  as  synonymous  with  consciousness  no  light  could  come  from 
this  source.  On  this  view  reason  is  built  up  on  the  basis  of  sense  per- 
ception, and  every  mental  construction  is  formed  in  the  focus  of  apper- 
ception and  takes  the  predominant  form  of  objectivity.  Psychology, 
to  be  sure,  had  a  class  of  objects  peculiar  to  itself;  but  its  method  was 
that  of  the  physical  sciences,  and  to  these  it  looked  for  its  logical  norms. 
The  reign  of  law  was  so  universal  that  no  testimony  conceivable  could 
ever  prove  a  miracle.  Seeing  then  would  not  be  believing,  but  would 
be  merely  delusions  or  hallucinations. 


THE  MIRACLES  669 

According  to  the  new  view  of  the  soul,  however,  consciousness  is 
only  one  partial  expression  of  psychic  life.  It  is  narrow  and  limited 
if  not  at  bottom  corrective  and  remedial.  It  is  intense  only  where 
adjustment  is  needed  or  something  is  Uable  to  go  wrong,  while  most 
of  its  activities  go  on  beneath  the  threshold  of  consciousness.  Much 
that  strives  to  come  into  its  focus  fails  to  do  so,  and  therefore  can  find 
expression,  if  at  all,  only  in  movements  or  tendencies  to  move  or  act, 
or  else  in  the  vast  domain  of  feeUng,  sentunent,  and  emotion  with  their 
somatic  reverberations.  There  are  strivings,  trends,  wishes,  anxieties 
galore  that  are  perpetually  repressed  and  submerged,  and  that  often 
express  themselves  in  abnormal  ways  as  symptoms  of  the  many  grouped 
and  tabulated  kinds  that  pathology  rubricizes.  Sometimes  these 
multifarious  tendencies,  incapable  of  taking  conscious  forms,  evade 
the  checks  that  hold  them  in  leash,  and  appear,  perhaps,  as  over- 
accentuations  of  insignificant  experiences  or  objects.  In  the  folk-soul, 
where  the  phenomena  of  individual  experience  are  often  rewritten, 
only  in  larger  and  more  legible  characters,  we  have  a  good  illustration 
of  this  class  of  happenings  in  fetishism.  Here  some  insignificant  and 
often  chance  object  is  Ufted  out  of  its  class,  made  sacred,  supercharged 
with  affectivity,  and  exalted  to  a  significance  for  life  and  death  itself 
because  overdetermined  by  becoming  a  focus  of  multiform  and  often 
submerged  associations.  These  processes  and  products  often  seem 
causeless  and  senseless,  but  if  the  data  are  accessible  so  that  they  can 
be  analyzed,  they  can  always  be  shown  as  subject  to  the  severest 
laws  of  cause  and  effect.  There  is  really  no  such  thing  as  chance  in 
the  whole  psychic  world,  sane  or  insane.  The  same  is  true  of  amatory 
fetishism.  One  person,  usually  in  dawning  pubesence,  is  drawn  to 
another  of  the  opposite  sex  by  the  deep  laws  of  compensation — ^which 
we  call  love.  The  elements  of  the  attraction  are  deep  and  many,  and 
too  intricately  compHcated  for  consciousness  to  grasp,  so  that  before 
it  is  recognized  as  love  it  may  already  be  far  along  in  its  development. 
To  immature  minds  thus  some  one  trait  or  feature,  hair  or  ears,  gait, 
voice,  or  even  attire  and  gesture  are  focussed  on  to  the  exclusion  of  all 
the  other  factors,  which  remain  unconscious  while  this  one  completely 
fills  the  little  stage  of  apperception  itself  alone,  yet  excites  every  symp- 
tom, sensuous  and  psychic,  of  love.  So,  too,  totemism  illustrates  e 
similar  hypertrophy  of  some  special  plant,  animal,  or  lifeless  object 
about  which  it  evolves  a  system  of  taboos.    Agam,  certain  attitudes 


670  JESUS   IN  THE  LIGHT  OF   PSYCHOLOGY 

or  acts  are  singled  out  and  ritualized,  spun  about,  almost  impupated 
in  a  felted  mesh  of  symbolic  meanings,  and  made  sacrosanct  by  emo- 
tivity, until  they  become  representatives  or  surrogates  of  a  psychic 
constituency  that  is  often  too  multifarious  to  be  individually  counted. 
Stresses  and  trends  of  this  order  give  miracles  their  unique  importance. 
They  are  made  and  clung  to  by  psychic  processes  of  the  same  order  as 
the  above,  so  that  the  explanation  of  either  throws  light  upon  the  others. 
Miracles  are  all  these  together,  but  more,  so  that  the  above  only  gives 
us  a  very  general  orientation  for  our  quest. 

Again,  the  soul  is  as  laminated  as  the  geological  strata  which 
now  give  us  more  or  less  coherent  series  of  fossil  remains  showing  the 
ascending  orders  of  life,  as  they  evolve,  one  after  another,  from  lowest 
to  highest,  in  which  we  find  that  many  types  have  become  extinct, 
while  many  other  ancient  ones  have  been  conserved  to  our  own  day. 
Just  as  man  arose  at  a  relatively  late  stage,  so  consciousness  evolved 
late  and  slowly  out  of  a  long  series  of  preconscious  stages  of  bhnd  im- 
pulses and  instincts.  Man's  conscious  life  to-day  is  a  very  recent 
product,  and  to  be  understood  must  be  seen  in  its  indefinite  perspective 
which  stretches  back  to  the  remotest  past.  Heredity  conserves  in  our 
souls  as  well  as  in  our  bodies  innumerable  vestiges  of  all  our  phyletic 
pedigree,  many  of  which  the  infant  recapitulates  in  its  psychophysic 
growth.  Thus  our  conscious  apperception  and  rational  activities  rep- 
resent the  topmost  twigs  of  a  vast  but  buried  tree.  Now  this  new 
psychic  mode  of  rational  life  is  still  only  partially  evolved,  and  is 
therefore  insecure  and  unstable.  We  have  no  such  established  equilib- 
rium with  our  environment  as  animals  have  acquired.  Hence,  our 
Hfe  is  not  on  one  level  but  rather  on  a  steeply  inclined  plane,  and  we 
are  incessantly  alternating  between  intense  adjustment  to  the  present, 
in  which  we  are  aggressive,  alert,  apperceptive,  pressing  on  to  new 
knowledge,  overcoming  obstacles,  advancing  the  kingdom  of  man, 
pushing  ahead  to  the  unknown  goal  of  life  with  the  whole  momentum 
of  the  evolutionary  nisus  behind  us,  maximizing  our  strenuosity  and 
efficiency  and  reinforcing  our  endeavour;  or  else,  on  the  other  hand,  we 
relax,  become  passive  or  backsliders,  and  revert  to  older  and  more 
autistic  types  of  thought,  feeHng,  and  will.  Even  when  most  poten- 
tialized,  man  does  not  dream  how  atavistic  he  is  and  how  he  is  shot 
through  with  old  veins  which  outbreak  in  all  he  does,  says,  and  feels: 
how  childish,  not  to  say  how  animal,  in  his  secret  heart,  and,  indeed. 


i 


THE  MIRACLES  671 

in  most  of  his  tun,  sollen,  und  haben.  To  modern  psychoanalysis  we 
owe  much  of  the  demonstration  of  this  new  aspect  of  Hfe  and  mind. 
This  is  not  expressed  with  entire  adequacy  by  saying  that  our  psychic 
life  is  laminated,  or  that  we  live  on  an  evolutionary  ladder  up  and  down 
the  rungs  of  which  we  are  constantly  moving.  It  is  better  to  conceive 
all  our  conduct  and  mentation  as  complexly  motivated  by  features 
new  and  old,  adult  and  childish,  rational  and  irrational,  conscious  and 
unconscious,  so  that  everything  that  we  do  is  coloured  if  not  shaped 
by  manifold  factors  from  the  immemorial  past.  Rest,  recreation, 
dreams,  and  even  sleep  itself,  as  well  as  neuroses  and  psychoses,  are  all 
either  wholly  or  largely  reversionary,  and  therefore  often  restorative. 

Now,  during  the  first  few  decades  after  Jesus'  death  and  under  the 
influence  of  the  conviction  that  he  had  arisen,  the  chief  impression 
left  by  his  life  and  words  was  that  he  had  brought  a  new  and  higher 
type  of  living,  a  sounder,  broader  view  of  the  world,  a  unique  standard 
of  purity,  and  that  those  who  followed  him  would  survive  death.  But 
all  this  was  as  hard  to  characterize  as  is  the  superman  for  us.  Every 
memory  of  him,  and  all  he  said  and  did,  had  not  only  to  be  reviewed 
but  radically  revised  in  the  light  of  the  Resurrection,  which  gave  the 
disciples  the  first  plenary  conviction  of  his  divinity.  Had  he  remained 
in  the  tomb  the  memorabilia  of  him,  had  they  been  written,  would 
have  been  revised  downward.  The  expectations  of  his  followers  would 
have  seemed  to  be  too  great,  and  he  would  have  been  regarded  only 
as  an  earnest,  intuitive  soul  preaching  an  idealism  too  good  to  be 
practically  true,  and  mth  some  power  of  healing  by  his  pure  and  im- 
pressive personaHty.  But  now  that  he  was  certainly  a  god,  all  was 
transformed.  Many  of  his  parables  dealing  with  special  precepts  of 
the  new  Ufe,  as  well  as  much  else  that  he  said,  could  be  recalled,  al- 
though a  good  deal  was  lost  owing  to  the  fallibility  of  memory  and  the 
inadequate  appreciation  of  his  significance  while  he  was  with  them. 
Many  things  not  forgotten  could  only  be  inaccurately  reproduced. 
What  was,  then,  the  net  resultant  or  the  whole  burden,  the  composite 
photograph,  of  what  he  meant  to  the  world? 

It  was,  as  we  have  said,  a  higher,  more  devoted,  and  intense  hfe; 
but  nothing  is  so  hard  to  characterize  or  describe.  This  life  involved 
new  ideals,  motives,  goals,  a  higher  potentialization,  and  a  complete- 
ness unmarred  by  sin.  It  meant  relief  from  the  oppressive  sense  of 
inferiority  that  we  all  feel  when  we  compare  what  we  are  with  what 


672  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

we  might  have  been.  It  meant  a  heightening  of  every  power  of  man, 
a  new  dominion  of  the  soul  over  nature,  such  as  science  has  actually 
achieved  since:  in  short,  a  new  and  loftier  kingdom  of  man.  This 
was  the  real  core,  heart,  root  and  soul  of  the  new  Gospel,  which  must 
be  intensively  proclaimed  to  a  careless,  inattentive,  sordid  world;  and 
this  must  be  done  at  once,  for  the  end  of  things  was  near.  Never  was 
such  a  great  and  pressing  heuristic  pedagogic  problem  presented  to  the 
mind  of  man,  and  those  upon  whose  souls  it  pressed  were  by  no  means 
ideally  fit  to  solve  it.  Paul  had  not  known  Jesus,  and  he  attempted 
to  reason  the  matter  out  according  to  his  lights.  But  the  Evangelists 
must  utiHze  their  memories  and  traditions  of  him  as  he  was  in  Ufe, 
and  had  no  recourse  save  to  find  or  make  symbols  of  his  message  to  the 
world  which  should,  if  possible,  be  connected  with  his  Ufe  and  made 
central  and  integral  to  it.  To  this  end  they  utilized  the  only  possible 
symbols  within  their  reach.  The  new  revelation  dispensed  to  them 
could  all  be  summed  up  in  the  most  portative  and  striking  way  by  say- 
ing that  the  Gospel  is  like  bringing  sight  to  the  bUnd,  hearing  and 
speech  to  deaf  mutes,  voluntary  movement  to  those  who  are  lame  and 
paralytic,  the  curing  of  all  specific  diseases,  feeding  the  hungry  with 
bread  marvellously  supplied,  changing  the  water  of  life  to  wine,  speak- 
ing peace  to  tempest-tossed  souls  torn  by  fears  and  distress  and  by 
anxiety,  the  mother  not  only  of  all  phobias  but,  as  we  now  know,  of 
about  every  psychosis  and  neurosis,  expelling  the  devils  of  temptation, 
bringing  perfect  sanity,  and  even  raising  the  moribund  or  the  dead. 
Such  are  the  best  possible  tropes  and  symbols  of  the  vita  nuova  he  had 
brought  into  the  world. 

But  the  Evangelists  were  no  rhetoricians,  and  figures  of  speech 
could  not  satisfy  them.  They  recalled  that  Jesus  had  wrought  cures 
that  seemed  to  them  marvels,  and  that  they  had  imitated  him,  not 
without  success.  Moses  and  the  prophets,  too,  had  done  even  greater 
marvels;  but  Jesus  was  now  proven  superior  to  them  all,  and  doubtless 
could  have  done  countless  greater  things  than  they.  His  Messianic 
ofi&ce,  too,  required  such  deeds.  He  had  in  very  truth  done  for  souls 
precisely  what  the  miracles  they  came  to  ascribe  to  him  typified.  Dur- 
ing all  the  years  between  his  death  and  the  composition  of  our  Gospels 
there  was  a  strong,  if  unconscious,  determining  tendency  to  make  him. 
do  what  it  was  so  desirable  that  he  should  have  done,  and  perhaps  it 
was  felt  that  he  could  hardly  have  left  his  followers  without  so  effec- 


I 


THE  MIRACLES  673 

tive  and  easily  provided  means  of  promulgation,  and  perhaps  would 
have  suffered  them  had  he  Uved.  Under  these  influences  the  wonders 
that  he  really  performed  grew  inevitably,  and  perhaps  imperceptibly, 
into  what  he  was  finally  reported  to  have  done;  for  the  historic  sense 
was  undeveloped,  and  the  impulsion  to  teach,  preach,  convince,  and 
convert  was  all  dominant.  Thus  these  miracles  were  no  products  of 
fantasy,  and  are  quite  unlike  all  others,  whether  those  done  by  his 
successors  or  ascribed  to  the  founders  of  other  religions,  in  that  they 
were  so  multifariously  motivated,  viz.:  (a)  by  the  cures  he  really  did; 
(b)  by  the  necessities  of  the  Messianic  role;  (c)  by  Old  Testament 
precedents;  (d)  by  the  cataleptic  conviction  that  to  a  self -resurrected 
God  they  would  have  been  easy  and  natural;  (e)  by  the  sense  that  they 
were  necessary  to  round  out  the  imperfect  records  of  his  Ufe,  and  there- 
fore, probably,  (f)  they  were  pressing  necessities  of  the  now  absorbing 
work  of  making  converts;  while  (g)  there  was  no  critical  censorship  for 
their  unschooled  minds,  or  in  their  land  and  age,  to  prevent  this  process. 
Thus  these  miracles  are  classics  of  their  kind,  and  like  the  Kantian  pos- 
tulates worked  well  for  the  early  Church,  which  would  have  been  very 
different,  if  it  could  have  even  existed  at  all,  without  them. 

To  the  synoptists,  however,  the  miracles  had  become  far  more  than 
postulates.  Indeed,  they  grew  to  be  the  most  actual  and  Hteral  of 
events.  They  petrified,  embalmed,  buried  the  very  spirit  of  Jesus  in 
these  crass  materializations,  and  here  for  complacent  orthodoxy  their 
spirit  still  lies  entombed.  Having  so  supremely  satisfied  subjective 
needs,  these  scenic  achievements  must  conform  to  such  crude  criteria 
of  objectivity  as  were  then  accessible.  These  figurate  receptacles  or 
imaginal  embodiments  of  precious  treasure  thus  became  sacrosanct 
and  inviolable.  Like  Plato's  preexisting  souls  imprisoned  in  bodies, 
so  their  soul  of  meaning  was  shut  up  and  almost  hidden  within  them. 
By  becoming  thus  incarnated,  if  the  light  went  out  the  heat  remained 
and  can  still  be  felt  and  communicated  in  the  deeper  strata  of  our  psy- 
chic life.  Although  conscious  reason  cannot  accept  them,  they  still 
have  a  subterranean  existence,  and  still  have  something  to  say  to 
Ahnung  and  the  deeper  intuitions,  although  outlawed  by  science. 
Criticism  cannot  entirely  eject  their  influences  from  any  soul  that  has 
ever  been  fairly  exposed  to  their  infection,  and  that  feels  strongly  the 
evolutionary  impulsion  to  a  fuller,  deeper,  better  life.  Religion  in  its 
very  nature  is  reversionary,  and  so  it  is  conserving  and  curative  by 


674  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

bringing  us  back  to  the  older,  better  organized  layers  of  our  psychic 
Hfe.  The  best  thing  about  Jesus  is  that  he  was  the  most  grown-up  of 
all  children,  and  the  most  childlike  of  all  men,  in  the  new  sense  in  which 
we  are  now  understanding  the  child  to  be  the  father  of  the  man.  He  is 
the  exemplar  of  the  best  type  of  adolescence,  most  constantly  yet 
temperately  inebriated  with  ideality,  and  of  this  supernormal  but  not 
superhuman  hfe  the  so-called  miracles  are  the  best  symbols. 

Thus  the  synoptists  were  in  a  sense  undertakers,  and  the  miracles 
are  holy  sarcophagi  in  which  the  most  vital  of  all  truths  have  been  laid 
away.  But,  happily,  they  are  only  in  a  state  of  suspended  animation, 
and  the  reverence  we  give  them  is  both  because  they  are  mementoes 
of  the  past  and  augurs  of  the  future,  when  their  cerements  shall  be 
burst  and  they  shall  come  forth,  as  so  many  of  the  great  dead  are 
thought  by  the  folk  to  be  sleeping  till  at  the  appointed  moment  they 
awaken  to  wield  again  the  destinies  of  man.  But  if  the  Gospel  writers 
interred,  they  also  and  thereby  preserved,  these  cadavers  of  truth 
against  the  time  when  their  soul  should  return  to  them.  When  they 
do  arise  and  speak  to  us,  their  message  is  that  there  was  once  and  will 
again  be  a  type  of  human  life  vastly  purer,  clearer-minded,  stronger- 
willed,  as  ready  to  die  as  to  live  as  best  serves  the  race,  more  com- 
pletely one  with  the  great  spirit  of  life;  a  new  life  that  seems  marvellous 
only  because  it  is  farther  on  and  higher  up  the  evolutionary  scale, 
and  compared  to  which  we  are  like  the  blind,  deaf,  crippled,  deformed, 
like  those  who  hunger  and  thirst,  and  perhaps  even  like  the  dead. 
Nevertheless,  hope  and  regeneration  are  possible.  They  are  symbols 
of  Jesus'  ecstatic  and  abounding  life,  and  thus  they  contain  the  very 
heart  and  soul  of  the  Gospel,  and  tell  us  in  different  allegories  only 
one  thing,  viz.,  that  a  far  better,  richer,  more  potent,  free,  joyous 
human  life  has  actually  existed  and  can  again  be  in  and  for  us.  Although 
their  voice  is  raucous  with  long  disuse,  they  call  to  us  again  just  as 
Jesus  did  to  his  companions,  to  awake,  arise,  unlimber  the  dormant 
powers  in  us;  to  really  see,  hear,  be  clean  and  morally  hygienic; 
to  truly  speak  and  say  something;  to  feed  our  souls  with  the  highest 
culture  and  not  with  gossip  of  local  and  personal  ephemeralities;  to  do 
great  deeds,  think  great  thoughts,  feel  the  larger  emotions,  and  thus  enter 
into  the  kingdom  of  man's  soul,  in  which  we  can  all  do  all  these  miracles 
upon  ourselves.  The  lesson  and  moral  of  the  miracles,  therefore,  is  the 
higher  powers  of  man.     They  teach  that,  as  Jesus  raised  himself  by  his 


THE  MIRACLES  675 

own  pure  inner  impulsions  from  a  mason-carpenter  to  Messianity  and 
Divine  Sonship  and  made  himself  the  focus  of  history,  to  which  so 
many  lines  before  him  converge,  and  from  which  they  since  diverge, 
thus  becoming  the  greatest  leader  and  light  in  the  world — ^precisely 
so  all  who  realize  what  he  was  and  did  can  do  in  and  for  themselves. 
They  show  that  there  is  nothing  in  his  real  hfe  not  possible  to  us,  ac- 
cording, of  course,  to  our  gifts  of  insight,  feeling,  and  endeavour; 
for  all  his  powers  differ  from  ours  only  in  degree  and  not  in  kind.  He 
was  the  man  in  and  upon  whom  all  these  miracles  were  truly  done. 
He  overcame  his  own  blindness,  deafness,  immobility  of  soul,  and  fed, 
reanimated,  cleansed,  and  potentialized  it.  Thus  in  their  spiritual, 
sublimated  sense,  the  miracles  are  the  rude  hieroglyphs  of  all  that  he 
was,  did,  and  said. 

Their  one  and  only  theme  is  human  dynamogenesis,  of  which  their 
very  oppugnance  to  law  and  theu-  impossibility  are  a  flaring  advertise- 
ment. For  centuries  before  Christ  the  secret  mysteries  of  the  great 
cults  of  Thrace,  Greece,  Asia  Minor,  and  Egypt,  the  scope  and  impres- 
siveness  of  which  scholarship  is  now  unearthing,  celebrated  by  their 
inaugmrations  the  death  of  winter  and  the  revival  of  spring  as  reahsed 
in  the  life  of  man.  As  cold  arrested  all  the  processes  of  nature  and  as 
spring  broke  the  spell  and  made  the  world  live  again,  so  they  thought 
sin,  ignorance,  and  routine  brooded  over  man's  soul,  chilled  and  ar- 
rested, while  insight,  purpose,  and  enthusiasm  were  light,  heat,  wine, 
and  inspiration,  intensified  to  an  almost  inarticulate  extreme  in  the 
Pentecostal  outpourings,  which  in  the  Attic  rites  degenerated  into 
maenadic  frenzy,  and  here  and  often  elsewhere  into  amatory  calentures. 
At  the  heart  of  all  these  ancient  ceremonies  we  find  regenerative  impul- 
sions more  or  less  ritualized  and  sublimated.  Jesus'  miracles  teach  the 
same  thing,  only  more  openly  and  specifically,  and  in  more  constel- 
lated yet  diversified  and  portable  ways.  They  are  rough  emblems  of 
psychic  springtide,  ugly  chrysalids  full  of  the  possibilities  of  new  Hfe, 
if  and  when  vernal  influences  came;  while,  after  life  had  burst  forth 
from  them,  they  were  but  casts  or  empty  shells.  Thus,  neither  the  old 
theology  nor  the  higher  criticism  can  explain  Christian  regeneration, 
but  are  themselves  beginning  to  be  ex-plained  by  geneticism,  which 
sees  in  this  new  life  a  symphony  of  many  parts,  the  oldest  of  which  is 
the  awakening  of  nature  by  spring,  the  bottom  tidal  wave  beneath  all. 
Upon  this  are  superposed  the  suggestions  that  come  from  dawn 


676  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

ban'shing  night,  and  the  sun  conquering  clouds  and  answering  the 
prayer  of  the  plant  and  animal  world  for  light.  Another  factor  is 
food  satisfying  hunger,  with  all  the  higher  symboHsm  which  it  has 
suggested  to  Truro.  Then  come  sex  and  its  spiritualization,  love,  the 
greatest  thing  in  the  world,  with  all  its  wealth  of  symbols  for  religion; 
release  or  convalescence  from  the  handicap  of  disease  and  the  cure  of 
traumata;  also,  self-conquest  and  control,  freed  from  lameness  or 
paralysis  in  the  new  city  of  psychic  hygeia,  and  so  on  up  to  the  modem 
forms  of  maximal  cultural  efficiency,  anticipating  the  ideal  reconstruc- 
tion of  the  material  and  social  world.  It  is,  of  course,  impossible  to 
tell  how  much  all  this  excelsior  impulsion  comes  from  any  one  of  the 
series  of  meristic  levels,  although  the  basal  factor  is  older  than  man. 
But  the  conclusion  is  that  the  Jesus-cult,  if  we  can  only  free  and  utilize 
it  aright,  contains  the  chief  promise  and  potency  by  which  man,  still 
embryonic  and  always  held  back  by  repressive  and  arrestive  influences, 
can  and  will  some  day  attain  his  full  maturity. 


CHAPTER  ELEVEN 

DEATH  AND  RESURRECTION  OF  JESUS 

I.  The  story  of  the  cross  the  world's  masterpiece  of  pathos — The 
cross  the  widest-known  symbol — How  its  story,  if  vividly  told,  affects 
children,  neurotics,  and  others,  like  Zinzendorf — Pity  fetishes,  or  the 
psychology  of  sympathy — ^The  closing  of  the  tomb  upon  Jesus,  the 
nadir  of  dysphoria — The  similarities  between  psychology  of  love  and 
of  death — II.  The  meaning  of  the  great  flood  toward  euphoria  and  the 
stages  by  which  the  Resurrection  was  believed,  beginning  with  the 
increduHty  which  regarded  the  reports  of  it  as  idle  tales,  on  to  the 
passionate  and  ecstatic  aflSrmations  of  Pentecost — The  gift  of  the  Holy 
Ghost — The  psychology  of  death  and  the  various  immortalities — Why 
death  is  hard  to  conceive — Immortality  as  a  support  of  morality — 
III.  Forms  of  behef  in  Resurrection — (a)  The  old  view  of  restoration 
of  a  putrefying  corpse — (b)  the  theory  that  it  was  a  revival  from  a 
trance  state — (c)  The  theory  that  it  was  due  to  a  more  subtle  form  of 
corporeity  or  a  ghost — (d)  The  vision  theory — (e)  The  psychological 
theory  of  a  great  resurgence  from  the  extreme  of  depression,  to  that  of 
exaltation — ^The  value  of  dying  and  rising  with  Jesus  as  an  immunity 
bath  against  schizophrenia — The  great  cults  of  antiquity  pre-  and 
post-Christian  which  centre  in  death  and  resurrection — The  psychology 
of  projection  and  of  purification  or  purgation — Guilt  taboo — All 
enemies  overcome  as  symbols  of  progressive  riddance  of  the  obsession 
of  sin  and  guilt  which  in  early  days  oppressed  the  human  soul — The 
meaning  of  the  eucharist — What  the  great  redemption  wrought  by 
Jesus  really  means  in  modern  terms. 

I. 

JESUS  is  most  widely  known  as  the  man  of  the  cross.  In  hun- 
dreds of  the  more  ignorant  and  backward  communities  of 
Christendom,  as  Mr.  Fielding  Hall  has  shown  with  some  detail, 
where  very  little  is  known  of  his  teachings,  his  character,  or  the  events 
of  his  life,  the  crucifix  is  found  and  revered.  Men,  women,  and  chil- 
dren who  cannot  read  regard  it  with  reverence  and  often  ascribe  to  it 
supernal  properties  and  magical  efficacy.  In  Catholic  lands  frag- 
ments of  the  true  cross  are  more  widely  disseminated  than  any  other 

677 


678  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

relic.  In  all  Christian  centuries  the  story  of  the  cross  has  been  the 
chief  theme  of  preaching,  the  centre  of  sacred  ceremonies,  and  the 
most  effective  propaedeutic  in  all  the  repertory  of  mission  methods 
among  pagans.  It  is  the  deepest  and  most  widespread  of  all  the 
impressions  that  Christendom  has  made  upon  the  human  heart.  In 
no  other  religion  has  the  death  of  the  founder  had  such  prominence 
and  efficacy.  The  natural,  objective,  sensuous  impressions  which 
each  of  the  events  of  Passion  Week  was  calculated  to  make  upon  the 
mind  and  heart  of  the  observer  have  been  wrought  out  with  great 
detail  in  descriptive  preaching,  in  narrative,  tradition,  and  art.  Every 
incident  has  been  amplified  and  filled  out  so  that  the  story  of  the  last 
stages  of  Jesus'  life  constitutes  the  world's  great  masterpiece  of  pathos. 
It  would  be  hard  even  for  creative  genius  to  add  new  elements  to  the 
story  that  could  materially  increase  the  mordant  effects  of  this  train 
of  events,  which  have  so  burned  and  eaten  into  the  very  soul  of  believers. 
Many  causes  have  lately  made  us  negligent  or  forgetful  of  this  fact. 
Critical  studies  which  enlist  the  intellect;  philosophy  which  neglects 
sensuous  facts  for  metaphysical  meanings  and  interprets  events  as 
symbols;  perhaps,  especially,  theology,  which  has  always  tended  to 
volatilize  the  full  humanity  of  Jesus  and  thus  make  the  Incarnation 
of  none  effect;  the  refinement  of  modern  nerves  that  shrink  from  the 
contemplation  of  physical  anguish;  the  perfervid  zeal  that  can  never 
wait  to  let  his  humanity  have  its  natural  effects  before  insisting  that 
the  man  Jesus  is  also  Very  God  of  Very  God,  thus  giving  the  biog- 
raphy of  Jesus  an  inexpugnable,  Docetic  innervation — all  these  have 
conspired  to  rob  the  story  of  his  death  of  its  pristine  hold  upon  the 
heart  and  make  it  seem  hollow  and  falsetto.  These  influences  tend  to 
take  away  his  Lord  from  the  average  Christian,  and  especially  from 
the  young,  and  to  abate  the  original  power  of  the  plain  story  of  the 
cross.  It  was  the  simple  narrative  of  death  and  resurrection  in  physical 
terms,  as  first  told  to  fresh,  receptive  minds,  that  really  made  the 
fortunes  of  the  nascent  Church. 

Neither  Greek  tragedy  nor  modern  history  or  romance  can  parallel 
the  "descending  incongruity"  of  the  decline  of  Jesus'  fortunes  from 
the  three  great  achievements  of  his  soul  (the  triple  conviction  that  he 
was  the  Jewish  Messiah,  the  Son  of  God,  and  the  Founder  of  a  new 
Kingdom),  to  the  anguish  in  his  own  and  the  utter  despair  in  the 
hearts  of  his  friends  at  his  death  and  burial.    The  faltering,  but  finally 


DEATH  AND  RESURRECTION  OF  JESUS  679 

resolute,  determination  to  go  to  Jerusalem,  the  necessity  of  which  may 
have  loomed  up  in  his  soul  like  an  apparition  of  fate;  the  prospect  of 
death  thrice  foretold;  the  entrance  into  Jerusalem,  perhaps  more 
ostentatiously  than  even  his  courageous  heart  really  sanctioned;  the 
conspiracy  of  the  rulers;  the  supper  at  Bethany;  the  Passover;  the 
treachery  of  Judas;  the  prayers  in  Gethsemane  while  thrice  the  disciples 
slept;  the  advent  of  the  soldiers;  the  kiss  of  betrayal;  the  hearing  before 
Caiaphas;  Peter's  denial  thrice;  Christ's  muteness  while  he  was 
buffeted,  mocked,  smitten  and  spat  upon;  his  silence  before  Herod; 
Pilate's  more  judicial  attitude  of  mind;  the  gorgeous  scarlet  robe  and 
crown  of  thorns  with  the  reed,  ironically  suggesting  a  kingship  neither 
of  this  world  nor  any  other;  the  release  of  Barabbas;  the  scourging; 
the  invocation  of  his  blood  upon  his  accusers'  heads;  the  death  of 
Judas;  the  cowardly  flight  of  every  disciple;  the  cross-bearing  with 
Simon;  the  woe  of  the  daughters  of  Jerusalem;  the  vinegar  and  gall; 
the  parting  of  the  garments;  the  mocking  inscriptions  and  taunts  to 
come  down  and  rule;  the  penitent  thief;  the  mother,  aunt,  and  the  two 
Marys,  alone  faithful  to  the  end,  which  has  so  often  suggested  a 
pathetic  romance;  the  agonizing  cry  of  being  forsaken  as  his  supreme 
conviction  of  Sonship  seemed  to  be  shaken;  the  earthquake,  the  spear, 
and  finally  the  tomb,  sealed  and  guarded — all  these  events  copiously 
amplified  in  detail,  set  in  scene  by  the  most  realistic  imagination,  every 
item  made  a  theme  of  meditation  until  it  stood  out  with  an  almost 
scarifying  and  sometimes  actually  stigmatic  effect  in  the  psychophysic 
organism  of  the  believer,  appeal  as  nothing  else  before  or  since  has 
ever  done  to  the  sentiments  of  sympathy  and  pity,  which  strike  to  the 
very  roots  of  man's  gregarious  nature. 

It  would  be  an  interesting,  although  perhaps  too  great  to  be  a 
practical,  task  to  mosaic  together  the  history  of  the  effects  which  these 
events,  regarded  as  purely  historical  and  pragmatic,  .have  wrought  in 
the  soul.  Every  station  of  the  cross,  and  many  apocryphal  instances 
as  well  as  ever}'thing  told  in  the  Gospels,  have  been  focussed  on  as  a 
special  theme  of  meditation,  a  basis  of  exhortation  as  typical  of  larger 
and  back-lying  meaning.  Believers  have  sought  closer  unity  with 
their  Saviour  by  reiterated,  prolonged,  agonizing  efforts  intensified  by 
fasting,  vigils,  and  solitude  remote  from  the  haunts  of  men,  etc.,  to 
actually  visuaHze  the  facts  as  if  they  had  been  eye-witnesses  to  it  all. 
They  have  sought  to  put  themselves  in  Jesus'  place  at  every  stage  and 


68o  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

to  realize  how  the  stripes,  thorns,  nails,  and  spear  would  feel.  Pious 
exercises  have  been  developed  and  assigned  peculiar  saving  efficacy, 
and  fanatics  have  sought  to  subject  themselves  to  some  of  these 
tortures,  even  the  cross  itself,  or  to  make  single  items  in  this  train  of 
sufifering  live  again  in  their  own  person.  Those  who  have  felt  them- 
selves failures,  who  have  been  deserted,  or  suffered  from  cumulative 
disasters  and  insults,  or  known  the  pangs  of  injustice,  have  brought 
their  own  experiences  to  bear  to  aid  them  in  realizing  the  anguish 
of  Jesus.  Cults  and  sects  have  arisen  to  bring  out  in  full  relief  special 
elements  in  this  the  world's  most  pathetogenetic  train  of  events. 

Perhaps  only  those  who  have  made  special  studies  in  this  field  real- 
ize how  effective  every  item  of  this  galaxy  of  incitations  to  pathos  still 
is  in  the  young,  in  whom  it  often  becomes  a  highly  specialized  pity 
fetish.  Some  illustrate  this  propensity  of  sympathy  to  focus  by  re- 
garding the  betrayal  by  a  kiss  as  the  acme  of  the  tragedy.  Others  feel 
a  lump  in  the  throat  or  sob  at  the  prayer,  "Father,  forgive  them." 
Others  have  physical  symptoms  at  the  thought  of  the  flesh  torn  and 
bruised  by  the  scourge.  And  so  the  commendation  of  his  mother  to 
the  care  of  the  beloved  disciple,  his  meeting  with  her  on  the  way  to 
Calvary,  the  stripping  of  the  garments,  the  three  falls  under  the  cross, 
the  Veronica  handkerchief,  the  silence  and  passivity  of  Jesus  before 
Herod,  the  scarlet  robe,  the  awful  invocation  by  the  Jews  of  his  blood 
upon  themselves  and  their  posterity — each  of  these  and  many  more, 
may  be,  have  been,  and  still  are  almost  maddening  or  may  bring  tears, 
heartache,  Umpness,  clenching  of  the  hands,  breaking  of  the  voice, 
constriction  in  the  chest,  weakness  of  knees,  involuntary  groaning  or 
sighing,  or  even  shrieking,  the  haunting  and  persistent  sense  of  help- 
lessness and  depression,  waves  of  flushing  or  chill,  and  other  vasomotor 
effects.  I  have  collected  many  instances  of  this  potent  contagion  of 
emotion  which  may  seem  to  some  almost  incredible,^  but  the  number 
and  character  of  which  place  them  beyond  all  doubt.  A  man  now 
forty,  from  the  age  of  about  fifteen  used  to  find  the  place  exactly  in  the 
centre  of  the  palm  of  his  own  hand  where  the  nails  went  in.  He  was 
later  wounded  very  near  this  spot  and  this  experience  in  his  quaint 
language,  "brought  him  to  Jesus."  Others  press  nails  against  their 
own  hands,  though  rarely  deeply  enough  to  bring  blood,  in  order  to 
realize  more  acutely  the  pangs  of  the  cross.     Many  develop  very  exact 

•See  article  oa  "Pity,"  Am  Jour.  Psychol.,  July,  1900,  Vol.  11,  pp.  3J4-S9I- 


\ 


DEATH  AND  RESURRECTION  OF  JESUS  681 

ideas  of  the  kind  of  nails.  They  are,  for  instance,  tenpenny  nails, 
blunt  at  the  point,  square,  sharp,  or  rusty.  For  some  the  very  sound 
of  the  word  "  nails  "  seems  cruel  and  causes  a  nervous  shudder.  A  few 
cannot  help  thinking  upon  them  so  intently  that  they  have  subjective 
sensations  in  the  hands.  A  few  on  seeing  nails  that  look  antique  feel 
pains  in  the  hands  from  the  strength  of  their  imagination  and  are  on  the 
way  to  stigmatization.  Others  muse  on  how  the  nails  were  driven  in, 
the  heads,  for  instance,  hammered  down  a  little  into  the  flesh  causing 
needless  pain,  and  how  the  last  blow  broke  the  skin  as  it  rolled  over  be- 
tween the  hammer  and  the  nail  and  spattered  the  blood  drops  that 
oozed  out.  Nervous  children  shudder  in  thinking  how  the  first  blows 
would  "squeech  and  creak"  before  the  nails  would  go  through  the 
flesh,  or  reflect  on  whether  the  larger  nails  that  went  into  the  feet 
would  come  out  in  front  of  the  heel  to  help  support  the  weight.  Of 
all  the  items  in  my  collection  the  nails  lead  in  this  kind  of  efficacy. 
The  scourging,  thorns,  spear,  and  other  tactile  or  haptic  sensations 
come  next.  The  spear,  for  instance,  is  often  vividly  imaged  as  dull  or 
blunt,  with  the  haft  a  little  larger  than  the  head,  or  barbed  so  that  the 
pain  of  withdrawal  was  greater  than  that  of  thrust.  One,  in  church, 
presses  her  hand  against  the  lower  rib,  sometimes  till  it  hurts,  to  feel 
more  vividly  the  spot  pierced  by  the  spear.  Some  conceive  it  thrust 
with  such  malice  that  it  penetrated  the  body  and  went  well  into  the 
wood  of  the  cross.  In  the  Ober-Ammergau  Passion  Play  the  most 
pathetic  moment  is  usually  when  the  spear  seems  to  enter  the  side  of 
Jesus.  A  tinselled  point  is  really  pushed  back  by  a  spring  into  the 
haft  causing  the  red  ink  used  for  blood  to  spurt  out.  I  have  seen  this 
four  times  and  inspected  the  apparatus,  but  loved  to  feel  the  sob  rising 
and  to  wipe  my  eyes.  We  must  reserve  for  publication  elsewhere 
fuller  details  of  this  propensity  of  the  youthful  soul  to  sensualize  the 
physical  suffering  of  the  Passion  and  to  make  it  not  merely  a  graphic 
or  dramatic  presentation  but  a  personal  experience.  All  this  shows  us 
again  how  nothing  in  any  of  the  old  dramatic  unities  is  so  calculated  to 
bring  out  every  strong  and  deep  tone  in  all  the  shades  and  degrees  of  pity 
that  can  wring  the  heart.  Were  the  whole  story  the  creation  of  some 
sublime  artistic  genius,  master  in  all  the  resources  of  aesthetics,  or  were 
it  the  slow  evolution  of  the  race  soul,  it  would  incite  amazement  and 
reverence  for  the  faculties  that  could  create  such  a  masterpiece. 

Pity  fetishes  seem  to  be  as  real  as  the  love  fetishes,  now  so  well 


682  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

recognized,  but  their  causation  is  quite  different.  The  very  young  can- 
not pity  intensely  because  they  have  not  had  sufficient  experience  in 
suffering  or  in  fear.  Defectives  are  lacking  in  sympathy  partly,  at 
least,  because  they  are  insensitive,  analgesic,  and  more  or  less  disvul- 
nerable.  In  general  the  average  man  pities  only  for  pains  he  has  felt 
himself  or,  in  a  secondary  way,  for  those  he  fears.  Thus,  we  come  to 
pity  in  others  evils  which  we  have  experienced,  or  to  which  we  feel  our- 
selves liable.  It  is,  therefore,  because  we  have  suffered  or  feared  in 
spots,  as  it  were,  that  sympathy  is  not  properly  distributed  but,  like 
phobias,  tends  to  focalization.  Plato  held  that  a  good  physician  must 
have  had  experience  with  disease  in  his  own  person  to  know  how  it 
feels  and  to  take  his  patient's  point  of  view.  Hence,  the  young,  whose 
lives  have  been  so  sheltered,  and  the  rich  reared  in  luxury,  who  can  so 
imperfectly  pity  the  poor,  cannot  rightly  distribute  theh:  sympathy. 
Hence,  too,  where  it  is  felt  it  is  prone  to  be  over-intense.  Only  genius, 
in  which  the  highest  powers  of  imagination  are  developed,  is  able,  with 
little  or  no  experience  with  woe,  to  feel  what  a  recent  writer  makes  its 
chief  characteristic — the  pathos  of  resonance. 

In  a  unique  study,  "Die  Frommigkeit  des  Graf  en  Ludwig  von  Zin- 
zendorf"  (Leipzig,  1910,  ii8  p.),  0.  Pfister  has  given  us  a  striking  analy- 
sis of  religious  sublimation  directed  chiefly  toward  the  wounds  of  Jesus. 
As  a  child,  Zinzendorf  had  no  outlet  for  his  affection,  which  slowly 
came  to  focus  in  a  unique  way  upon  the  physical  personality  of  Jesus; 
and  so  as  a  boy  he  wrote  letters  to  Jesus  which  he  threw  out  of  the 
window  at  night.  He  prayed,  was  entranced,  practised  asceticism, 
but  the  unique  fact  in  his  whole  religious  career  was  that  it  was  the 
blood  and  wounds  of  Jesus  which  exerted  a  supreme  fascination  for 
him.  In  the  community  he  founded  there  were  agapistic  elements, 
and  the  most  passionate  affection  was  expressed  for  Jesus,  the  bride- 
groom and  lover.  Parts  of  his  body  and  special  wounds,  particularly 
that  in  the  side,  were  apostrophized  in  sermons,  and  their  drawing 
power  characterized  in  hymns.  Believers  wished  to  hide  themselves 
in  these  wounds,  and  their  very  festering  had  a  charm.  "  They  lived 
in  the  wounds,  were  born  from  them,  and  envied  the  worms  that  dwelt 
in  them,  their  home."  They  even  developed  a  litany  expressive  of 
this  cult  that  had  a  jargon  of  its  own,  and  in  scores  of  their  hymns 
Christ's  corpse  is  kissed  and  eaten,  in  an  orgy  of  traumatolatry  which 
was  strangely  bound  up  with  their  doctrine  of  redemption.    It  was 


DEATH  AND  RESURRECTION  OF  JESUS  683 

not  all  a  Sadistic  gloating  over  Jesus'  sufferings,  but  there  were  mas- 
ochistic elements  in  it;  the  wounds  were  erogenic  zones.  Indeed, 
the  author  tells  us  that  even  Luther's  eucharistic  ideas  were  somewhat 
nekrophagic. 

Sympathy,  too,  begins  at  home  with  a  few  friends  or  loved  ones, 
and  irradiates  to  those  remote  in  time,  place,  or  associations  slowly  and, 
in  a  sense,  inversely  as  the  square  of  the  distance.  It  is  intensified  by 
physical  beauty,  by  every  personal  charm  and  grace  of  disposition,  and 
every  gift  that  provokes  admiration.  Perhaps,  as  we  have  seen,  this 
element  was  a  part  of  the  magnetism  that  drew  the  friends  of  Jesus  to 
him.  Instead  of  emaciation  and  ugliness,  which  art  has  sometimes 
assumed  for  him  and  which  the  friends  of  Socrates  doubtless  magnified 
to  bring  out  in  stronger  relief  the  beauties  of  his  soul,  his  nature  may 
have  been  at  once  so  commanding  and  attractive  as  to  give  him  that 
rare  prestige  which  often  comes  from  this  source.  Again,  spring  sug- 
gests life  as  autumn  does  death.  With  this  the  cults  of  Balder, 
Apollo,  and  many  others  have  always  been  very  intimately  merged. 
The  heart  expands  and  feels  far  more  keenly.  Again,  Jesus  was  young 
and  cut  off  in  the  height  of  his  promise  wdth  a  work  of  incalculable 
magnitude  but  just  begun,  so  that  we  have  here  the  keen  pathos  of  un- 
realized hope.  For  the  old,  who  have  lived  out  a  fully  rounded  life  to 
the  end;  who  have  finished  their  work;  who  fortify  themselves  by 
thoughts  of  their  good  deeds,  perhaps  now  even  by  Weismannism, 
which  has  sources  of  consolation  not  yet  utilized;  who  have  risen  to 
the  largest  ideas  and  in  so  doing  are  de-individualizing  themselves 
and  dying  the  death  of  Platonic  philosophers  in  whom  the  great  bio- 
logos  has  accompUshed  its  work  of  involution;  who  have  beaten  the  mas- 
terly retreat  that  can  make  old  age  glorious;  who  are  surrounded  by 
friends — even  under  these  circumstances  death,  with  its  horrid  ac- 
companiments of  pallor,  weakness,  perhaps  unconsciousness;  the  sweat, 
agony,  rattle,  and  final  cessation  of  breath;  the  rigidity,  coldness  and 
decomposition,  is  the  king  of  terrors  for  all  who  witness  it.  But  for 
those  cut  off  prematurely,  with  the  gifts  and  possibilities  of  rich  lives 
undeveloped,  it  is  incalculably  more  ghastly  and  horrid.  Again,  inno- 
cence and  non-resistance  intensify  the  pathos  of  it.  I  have  myself  in 
my  study  of  pity  witnessed  two  hangings  of  criminals,  both  of  whom 
had  committed  crimes  so  namelessly  horrible  that  the  indignation  of 
communities  was  aroused  to  a  high  pitch.     One  managed  to  meet  death 


684  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

with  some  repose  and  the  other  struggled  insanely,  but  here  even  strong 
men  fainted  or  grew  sick  and  withdrew.  Resentment,  for  the  moment 
at  least,  seemed  swallowed  up  in  pity  for  those  suffering  what  has 
always  been  for  man  his  supreme  dread.  But  for  one  with  no  fault  or 
crime  to  die  with  every  mental  and  physical  torture  which  he  might 
have  escaped,  and  to  accept  it  all  with  equanimity,  especially  when 
his  great  sacrifice  was  for  the  weal  of  others,  must  have  aroused  in  the 
faithful  few  that  witnessed  it  emotions  of  a  kind  and  intensity  very 
rarely  felt  in  the  human  soul  and  which  art  and  Uterature  are  powerless 
adequately  to  describe.  Justice  seemed  dethroned,  and  the  resent- 
ment against  even  the  race  that  caused  this  tragedy  has  ever  since  been 
deep,  persistent,  and  widespread,  bUnd  and  unreasoriing  as  it  is.  All 
these  considerations  have  been  developed  and  dwelt  upon  in  Christian 
cults,  which  have  in  every  way  sought  to  magnify  their  great  natural 
impressiveness  on  the  theory  that  every  man  had  sin  enough  in  his 
own  soul  to  merit  all  this  agony  himself  and  that,  by  vicariously  fol- 
lowing the  way  of  the  cross  as  far  as  imagination  and  tender-heartedness, 
goaded  on  by  every  provocative,  could  go,  the  heart  could  be  cleansed 
of  sin,  and  experience  a  saving  virtue  in  feeHng  anew  all  these  wounds 
of  Jesus. 

In  the  story  of  the  Passion,  as  interpreted  in  Christendom,  Jesus  is 
often  placed  in  the  attitude  of  craving  sympathy.  He  made  no  sub- 
lime Promethean  resistance  against  the  will  of  heaven,  attempted  no 
heroics  or  even  a  Socratic  apology,  but  bowed  to  the  divine  will,  fate, 
or  kismet  with  utter  submission,  with  a  passivity  that  was  more  femi- 
nine than  mascuhne.  He  seems  to  many  to  have  desired  to  excite 
compassion,  and  would  have  his  followers  die  with  him  and  rehearse 
all  his  litany  of  woe  to  make  their  self-abandonment  complete.  Hart- 
mann  has  given  us  a  new  and  deeper,  if  also  somewhat  grotesque,  glori- 
fication of  pity  in  his  theory  that  the  Absolute,  before  all  the  worlds 
were,  was  suffering  intolerable  pain,  and  that  their  creation  was  like 
an  eruption  that  "ameUorated  his  negative  eudemonism,"  and  insists 
that  the  highest  of  all  motives  to  virtue  is  to  pity  divinity,  and  thus  to 
hasten  on  by  a  new  motivation  to  morals  and  good  works  God's  ulti- 
mate reHef  from  transcendental  pain  and  redemption. 

On  the  other  hand,  familiarity  always  tends  to  blunt  the  effects  of 
this  sentiment.  Our  returns  abound  in  expressions  of  regret  and  self- 
reproach  that  the  whole  story  of  Jesus'  sufferings  is  now  heard  with  in- 


DEATH  AND  RESURRECTION  OF  JESUS  685 

difference.  Many  think  they  are  growing  hardened,  grieving  the  Spirit, 
fear  they  are  losing  behef,  or  backshding,  growing  stagnant;  find  they 
pity  saints,  contemporaries,  characters  in  romance  or  even  suffering 
animals,  more  than  they  can  Jesus;  or  perhaps  think  this  is  all  because 
their  sympathy  has  been  overdone,  forced,  or  premature. 

Moreover,  there  is  much  in  modern  life  to  discourage  pity,  the 
pleasure  field  has  widened  so  rapidly  with  growing  civilization  and  com- 
fort and  immunity  to  want.  Aristotle  had  what  seems  to  us  a  strange 
dread  of  the  overmastering  power  of  pity,  for  which  he  thought  it 
necessary  to  find  in  the  drama  or  in  art  a  method  of  purgation  by  his 
well-known  theory  of  katharsis  or  psychic  vaccination,  or  setting  a 
back  fire.  Spinoza  thought  it  an  unworthy  sentiment  wherever  it 
did  not  prompt  action  for  relief.  Story  readers  who  are  so  inebriated 
by  woe  that  it  becomes  an  obsession,  who  in  serials  implore  romancers 
not  to  let  their  heroes  die  or  suffer,  are,  if  this  be  true,  marked  with  the 
stigmata  of  degeneration.  Darwinism  comforts  us  by  the  doctrine 
that,  although  the  majority  of  known  species  and  animals  perish  in 
pain,  it  is  on  the  whole  the  best  that  survive.  Nietzsche  excoriates 
those  who  pity,  and  his  Zarathustra  denounces  all  who  either  crave  or 
indulge  in  this  sentiment  as  hysterical.  For  him,  as  for  the  Stoics,  the 
sage  would  blush  to  be  pitied  or  to  pity,  and  he  finds  here  a  pathogenic 
element  in  Christianity  and  calls  Jesus  an  amiable  and  neurotic  degen- 
erate. 

Profoundly  as  we  dissent  from  this  view,  this  is  not  the  place  to 
discuss  the  normaUty  of  the  sentiment  of  pity,  but  only  its  power  and 
wide  prevalence.  For  Christendom  it  was  a  unique  moment  when  the 
body  of  Jesus  was  wrapped  in  clean,  fine  linen  with  Nicodemus's  "mix- 
ture of  myrrh  and  aloes  about  a  hundred  pounds'  weight,"  placed  in  a 
new  sepulchre  hewn  in  a  rock,  sealed  up  with  a  stone,  and  guarded  by 
a  watch.  As  to  the  state  of  mind  of  the  friends  and  disciples  during 
these  three  days,  and  especially  on  the  Jewish  Sabbath  which  inter- 
vened, we  know  nothing  whatever,  for  the  record  is  an  utter  blank. 
Peter,  the  rock,  had  shown  himself  a  vociferous,  triple  perjurer,  and 
the  disciples  seem  to  have  been  skulking  fugitives  seeking  their  per- 
sonal safety.  Many  must  have  felt  their  hero  to  be  of  clay,  either  an 
impostor  or  a  foolish  dreamer.  That  they  thought  this  the  end  of 
him  on  this  earth  is  plain;  for  when  told  that  he  was  risen  these  "words 
seemed  to  them  as  idle  tales,  and  they  believed  them  not."    "Ac 


686  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

yet  they  knew  not  of  the  Scripture  that  he  must  rise  again  from  the 
dead."  "And  they,  when  they  had  heard  that  he  was  ahve  and  been 
seen  of  her,  believed  not."  The  Jewish  belief  that  righteousness  was 
rewarded  and  e\il  punished  here,  which  was  so  persistent  in  the  minds 
of  the  disciples,  must  have  wrought  great  disenchantment.  When 
Rome,  the  hope  of  the  world,  was  falling,  we  read  that  at  the  death  of 
Otho  the  Good  many  slew  themselves  from  sheer  pity.  The  logic  of 
pessimism  or  Stoicism  must  have  made  suicide  the  theme  of  every 
philosophic  mind  under  those  circumstances,  for  the  last  spark  of  hope 
had  gone  out  in  utter  darkness.  The  grief,  humiliation,  sleeplessness, 
must  have  made  this  the  nadir  of  despair  for  them  all.  Only  the  lust 
of  Ufe  in  youth  (Keim  thinks  the  average  age  of  the  disciples  was  but 
Httle  over  twenty)  must  have  sustained  them.  What  if  he  had  lain 
in  the  grave  a  month,  year,  decade,  century,  and  then  arisen  gloriously, 
or  perhaps,  when  all  who  knew  him  were  dead?  It  is,  of  course,  impos- 
sible to  conjecture  what  would  have  occurred  had  there  been  no  sequel. 
His  followers  had  no  possible  source  of  hope  or  consolation  in  their 
anguish.  Everything  that  had  begun  to  germinate  in  their  souls  dur- 
ing the  years  of  intercourse  with  their  master  must  be  left  to  die  or  be 
actively  exterminated.  The  powers  of  darkness  seemed  to  be  at  the 
helm.  The  world  was  a  "  City  of  Dreadful  Night,"  and  with  the  Great 
Companion's  shameful  and  miserable  death  a  pall  shrouded  the  earth 
and  left  his  friends  a  prey  to  nameless  fears.  Grief  at  his  loss,  the 
pathos  of  his  suffering,  mortification  at  their  own  misguidance,  strug- 
gled together  in  their  souls,  or  perhaps  left  them  stunned  so  that  when 
they  found  their  bearings  they  had  to  strike  out  a  new  plan  of  life. 
It  might  be  wisest  to  live  for  the  day  and  hour,  and  worship  the  blind 
power  of  wrong  or  fate  on  the  throne  of  an  antimoral  universe.  Thus, 
in  their  agony  they,  too,  in  a  figurative  sense,  descended  into  hell, 
tasted  all  the  spiritual  torments  it  could  inflict,  and  touched  the  pro- 
foundest  depths  of  dysphoria.  Moreover,  all  their  personal  and  racial 
ideas  and  beliefs  in  a  transcendent  world  of  rewards  and  punishments 
lay  in  ruins.  If  there  had  been  anything  in  man  really  worth  while 
that  could  survive  death,  he  who  was  so  solemnly  pledged  to  do  so 
must  come  back,  or,  at  least,  give  some  sign  of  post-mortem  survival. 
This  he  failed  to  do,  and  nothing  remained  of  him  but  a  corpse  that 
was  doomed  to  moulder,  and  the  aching  recollections  that  clutched 
their  hearts.    This  Hfe  must  be  the  be-all  and  death  the  end-all,  and 


DEATH  AND  RESURRECTION  OF  JESUS  687 

every  man  only  awaits  like  the  brutes  the  inevitable  hour  of  total  en- 
gulfment  in  the  grave.  ^Man  is  a  fleeting  pillar  of  dust  thrown  up  by  a 
rude  wliirlwind.  Even  their  bitter-sweet  memories  of  him  would  soon 
be  swallowed  up  in  oblivion.  Perhaps  the  thoughts  of  different  in- 
dividuals drifted  in  all  these  different  ways.  Some  may  have  lapsed 
to  resentment  and  indignation  that  their  hopes  and  endeavours  had 
been  thus  bankrupted.  Such,  at  least,  is  the  psychological  apprecia- 
tion of  such  an  historic  situation.  There  was  no  comfort  from  the 
psychic  law  that  the  healthy  soul  by  its  very  nature  cannot  remain  long 
in  a  state  of  extreme  depression,  but  must  react  toward  some  more 
exalted  state,  so  that  the  entire  moral,  social,  religious  world  which  was 
wrecked  and  reduced  back  to  chaos  for  them,  must  be  built  up  again 
in  some  form,  or  else  they  must  succumb  to  the  grim  logic  of  miser- 
abilism. 

The  psychology  of  death  and  of  love  agree  in  each  having  an  un- 
envisageable  fact  at  its  core,  the  one  a  putrefying  corpse,  the  sight  of 
which  started  Buddha  on  his  career,  the  other  the  sex  act  and  organs. 
The  psychalgia  of  the  one  and  the  shame  and  modesty  that  veil  the 
other  have  used  the  same  mechanisms,  such  as  repression,  fetishism, 
diversion,  over-determination  and  sublimation,  and  each  from  its 
respective  core  has  evolved  a  most  elaborate  superstructure  that 
has  played  a  tremendous  role  in  human  culture.  There  is  a  sense  in 
which  all  fears  and  phobias  are  at  bottom  fears  of  death  or  of  the 
arrest  of  the  momentum  of  life,  and  there  is  also  a  sense  in  which 
gratification  of  every  desire  and  wish  is  that  of  love.  The  one  is  the 
supreme  afi&rmation  of  the  will  to  live,  the  other  the  great  negation. 
The  real  meaning  of  death  is  not  understood  until  puberty.  Just 
as  art  and  religion  are  largely  made  up  of  sublimated  sex  feelings, 
so  out  of  the  fear  of  death  have  grown  the  medical  sciences,  hygiene, 
and  what  is  far  more  important,  the  desire  for  and  belief  in  immor- 
tality. Both  death  and  the  act  of  love  transcend  individuality,  and 
neither  is  entirely  hcwusstseinsfahig.  The  "  death- thought "  and  the 
"  love- thought "  sometimes  spring  up  suddenly  and  spontaneously, 
and  make  us  realize  that  they  are  the  voice  of  the  race  in  the  individual, 
and  that  our  consciousness  about  the  matter  is  only  an  epiphenomenon. 
In  both  the  genetic  impulse  shields  the  child  by  diverting  attention 
from  the  central  fact  to  countless  irrelevancies  and  accessories.  Just 
as  racial  instinct  has  striven  to  prevent  sex  precocity,  so  religion 


688  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

strives  to  mitigate  the  old  horror  of  the  fact  that  we  must  all  die  and 
cease  to  be,  body  and  soul.  The  Pentecostal  conviction  that  the 
great  incubus  of  ages,  the  greatest  of  all  repressions,  had  been  removed, 
was  the  culminating  moment  of  history. 

Every  mode  of  disposing  of  the  dead  is  motivated  largely  by  the 
impulse  to  repress  or  divert  us  from  thoughts  of  the  putrefying  corpse, 
and  belief  in  reanimation  and  another  life  serves  the  same  purpose. 
The  survivors  must  be  prevented  from  dwelling  on  the  natural  proc- 
esses of  decay,  and  so  these  diverting  and  defensive  mechanisms  have 
been  evolved.  Their  worth  is  not  all  in  what  they  give  but  in  what 
they  save  us  from,  viz.,  obsessive  thoughts  of  the  body's  decay.  They 
are  therapeutic  measures  against  thanatophobia.  The  impulse  to 
embalm,  to  deck  out  corpses,  is  a  diversion  mechanism  as  much  as 
the  fig-leaf,  breech-cloth,  or  wedding-dress.  Of  course  the  four 
immortalities,  nominal,  influential,  plasmal,  and  orthodox,  have  other 
motivations,  but  they  sustain  and  support  each  other  in  ways  which 
only  this  key  reveals. 

II 

But  now  from  this  direst  of  extremities  came  the  great  reaction, 
the  pivot  of  history  for  Christendom,  which  made  the  grave  of  the  old 
world  the  cradle  of  a  new  one.  Although  there  may  have  been  watches 
and  vigils,  there  is  no  recorded  eye-witness  of  the  Resurrection.  The 
first  news  of  the  empty  tomb  was  brought  by  Mary  the  Mother,  Mary 
the  Magdalene,  who,  it  is  often  conjectured,  had  fallen  in  love  with 
Jesus,  or  both  of  them,  so  that,  as  Renan  says,  the  first  promulgator, 
announcer,  preacher  of  the  Gospel  of  glad  tidings  was  woman  who,  in 
this  office,  followed  the  directions  of  an  angel  with  fear  and  trembling. 
The  news,  according  to  the  record,  was  received  with  every  indication 
of  increduHty  and  skepticism  as  "idle  tales."  The  sight  of  the  vacant 
tomb  and  even  the  first  parousia  were  unconvincing.  If  it  was  not  a 
hallucination  or  a  theft  of  the  body,  a  dream  or  a  fiction,  conviction, 
at  any  rate,  began  at  a  faint  suggestive  stage  and  we  have  few  details 
of  how  it  passed  up  the  long  scale  of  probabilities  till  it  reached  a 
cataleptic  certainty.  The  epochful  fact,  however,  is  that  the  cer- 
tainty of  it  soon  became  so  intense  and  peculiar  that  it  needed,  if  it 
did  not  create,  faith  as  a  new  faculty,  whose  chief  function  was  to  cher- 
ish it.    Thus  the  Resurrection  soon  became  the  chief  affirmation  and 


DEATH  AND  RESURRECTION  OF  JESUS  689 

source  of  power  of  Christendom,  the  key  to  the  right  understanding  of 
the  entire  apostolic  and  even  patristic  period.  "If  Christ  be  not  risen 
our  faith  is  vain."  Many  other  faiths  had  held  to  a  future  life,  but 
all  with  far  fainter  certainty.  It  was  better,  thought  Homer,  to  live 
the  life  of  a  common  man  than  reign  in  the  kingdom  of  the  dead,  where 
all  is  pallid  and  unreal.  Henceforth  the  behef  in  another  life,  of  which 
the  Resurrection  is  the  object  lesson  and  proof,  became  the  main- 
spring of  activity.  As  faith  became  absolute  Jesus  was  chiefly  known 
as  the  death-killer,  the  first  fruits  of  them  that  slept,  the  one  who  had 
removed  the  sting  of  death  and  caused  it  to  be  swallowed  up  in  victory. 
Although  he  came  back  weak  and  exhausted,  it  was  as  a  conqueror. 
"Death-exterminator"  was  his  chief  epithet.  Not  only  this,  but  he 
had  raised  others,  and  more  yet,  had  gone  to  Hades  and  vanquished 
the  ruler  of  death  and  sin.  The  power  of  the  Resurrection  was  the 
chief  theme  of  the  first  preaching.  Christ  had  bearded  the  king  of 
terrors  and  burst  the  bars  of  the  tomb.  Tertullian  compares  him  to  a 
phoenix  rising  from  his  own  ashes.  Thomas  had  actually  felt  the  body 
and  its  wounds,  and  five  hundred  at  once  had  seen  it;  and  after  the 
Ascension  the  abode  of  the  dead  was  upward.  The  present  world  is 
mean,  life  is  short  and  squalid,  and  earth  made  perhaps  by  a  vicious 
demiurge,  as  the  Marcion  heresy  later  taught.  Thus  it  was  not  strange 
that  the  first  book  of  the  New  Testament  to  be  written  was  a  revelation 
or  apocalypse  of  a  higher  world  order,  describing  a  new  Jerusalem  in 
which  are  all  the  treasures  which  the  heart  holds  dear.  Its  architecture 
is  elaborate  and  gorgeous,  and  slowly  not  only  its  details  but  those  of 
Tartarus  and  purgatory  grow  to  Dantesque  vividness.  This  world 
is  ecHpsed  by  the  other.  It  will  burn,  but  all  things  worth  saving  are 
in  the  great  Beyond.  Just  as  Alaric  destroyed  Rome  and  the  hope  of 
the  world  for  man  as  a  poHtical  animal,  Augustine  described  the  City 
of  God,  and  the  Church  inherited  the  forms  and  ambitions  of  the 
Roman  State. 

The  world  had  been  ruled  by  fear,  and  the  greatest  of  all  the  fears 
is  that  of  death.  To  be  reheved  of  this  and  all  so  suddenly  (for  it  was 
barely  fifty  days  from  Calvary  to  Pentecost),  caused,  as  was  most 
natural,  an  outburst  of  unbounded  enthusiasm  that  in  some  tempera- 
ments amounted  almost  to  delirium.  Men  chanted,  raved,  spoke  in 
unknown  tongues,  prophesied,  gazed  up  into  heaven  all  day,  longed 
for  vision,  with  a  real  parottsia-msinisi,  straining  to  grasp  the  momen- 


690  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

tous  fact  that  death  was  swallowed  up  in  victory,  that  its  incubus  and 
awful  inhibition  were  removed.  Every  human  faculty  let  itself  go 
with  abandon  to  excesses  often  riotous.  Men  babbled  as  if  drunk  with 
new  wine,  were  erethic  and  beside  themselves.  There  were  new  ideas 
of  inspiration,  and  belief  in  possession.  So  widespread  and  intense 
was  this  tendency  that  it  was  necessary  to  make  strenuous  efforts  and 
adopt  stern  measures  to  come  back  to  sanity  and  reaUty  and  prove  all 
spirits.  The  normative  form  of  this  outburst  of  enthusiasm  was  the 
doctrine  of  the  Holy  Ghost  selectively  evolved.  Thus  to  save  the 
nascent  Church  from  inebriation  from  its  great  joy,  it  was  necessary 
to  turn  attention  to  practical  efforts;  hence,  preaching,  proclaiming  the 
good  news,  and  making  propaganda  was  the  first  mundane  direction 
of  the  new  life.  ^ 

The  attitude  toward  spirits  Weinel  calls  "the  most  essential  pos- 
session of  the  innermost  personal  Hfe  of  primitive  Christendom,"  and 
shows  how  the  ideas  of  the  Holy  Spirit  developed  out  of  the  intense  mul- 
tifarious spiritism  that  long  ruled.  Powers  of  evil  had  made  themselves 
felt  even  in  the  temptation  of  Jesus.  They  inspired  all  evil  and  gave 
doubt.  Thus,  behind  the  world  were  mighty,  invisible,  personal  influ- 
ences well  organized,  leagued,  and  graded,  and  Jesus  had  conquered  the 
ministers  of  evil  and  brought  the  Holy  Ghost  which  conquered  hate, 
consoled,  guided  into  truth,  gave  certainty,  and  could  make  all  believ- 
ers truly  pneumatic  as  well  as  denizens  of  the  higher  and  only  real 
world.  Glossolaha,  singing,  praying,  poetizing,  convulsions,  narrating 
words  heard  in  ecstasy,  inspiring  authorship  that  noted  the  experiences 
of  trancelike  states,  sometimes  even  cramps,  symbols,  acts,  all  super- 
nally  motivated,  were  slowly  subjected  to  a  criticism  which,  if  it  hmited 
the  richness  and  variety  of  pneumatic  life,  slowly  came  to  an  increas- 
ingly normal  direction  and  bestowed  gifts  essentially  good.    Pneu- 

'On  this  interesting  development  see  the  admirable  work  of  Weinel,  "Die  Wirkungen  des  Geistes  und  der  Geister 
im  Nachapostolischen  Zeitalter  bis  auf  Irenaus."  Leipzij?,  iSgg.  Upon  speaking  with  tongues  there  is  already  an 
interesting  if  limited  literature.  Godet  thought  it  a  hybrid  between  song  and  lanijuage,  a  kina  of  rtcilatij,  and  found  it 
somewhat  diffused  among  the  prophets.  It  was  developed  in  the  cult  of  the  Delphic  Oracle  of  Afxjllo,  among  the  Thra- 
cian  orgiasls  and  ecstatics.  Paul  characterized  and  named  it  as  one  of  the  charismata.  It  was  common  among  the 
Quakers,  and  Edward  Irving  called  it  the  gift  of  the  Holy  Ghost.  See,  too,  Schmiedel's  ".\usfUhningen,"  IT,  i,  Frei- 
burg, 191a,  which  is  best  from  the  philolo;:»ical  point  of  view;  also  Lombard's  "  De  la  Glossolalie,"  1910;  and  Mossiman's 
"Zungeareden,"  Tubingen,  191 1.  Espeaally  see  Pfister's  study,  "Die  psychologische  Entratselung  der  relig.  Gloss- 
olalie und  der  auto.Tiatischen  Kryptographie."  in  Jahrb.f.  PsyrJioaHolyse.  u.  psychopath.  Fnrsch.,  Bd.  y,.  iQia,  in  which 
be  censures  theologians  for  having  done  so  little  here,  which  began  with  a  youn'<  man  of  twenty-four  who,  at  seventeen 
years,  on  Pentecost  felt  inspired  to  make  brief  utterances  that  no  one  could  understand.  Pfister  was  able  to  take  dowp 
a  lirge  part  of  his  very  limited  vocabulary  and  explain  each  word  in  it,  showing  the  source  and  meaning  of  it  all.  His 
exhortations  expressed  his  own  desire  to  study  and  get  religious  clearness,  and  how  he  ardently  wished  to  be  a  preacher 
and  to  marry  a  certain  girl.  It  was  a  distortion  of  language  made  in  order  so  to  disguise  the  utterances  of  the  most  sec- 
ret things  of  his  soul  that  nobody  could  understand,  and  yet  he  could  vent  all  that  vas  in  him.  His  glossolalia  proved 
infectious  and  he  later  developed  a  cryptographic  unknown  languace,  and  finally  there  came  to  be  some  liturgical  stere- 
otypy. His  sister's  unknown  tongue  played  a  good  deal  uiwn  English,  and  his  mother's  upon  Italian,  but  both  were  very 
infantile.  Pfister  thinks  this  the  same  as  the  xenoglossolatia  that  appeared  among  the  rabbins  or  the  phenomena  of 
Pentecost,  or  that  it  was  related  to  the  unknown  tongue  in  which  Isaiah  snoke  to  the  Jew.s  See  also  Flournoy,  "Des 
Indes  h.  la  planete  Mars,"  Paris,  1900, 430  p.    This  gives  both  specimens  ana  theories. 


DEATH  AND  RESURRECTION  OF  JESUS  691 

matophores  were  inspired  to  prophecy  and  virtue  by  spirits  that  came 
from  God  by  baptism,  laying  on  of  hands,  etc.^ 

Thus  the  reality  of  a  psychic  far  transcending  that  of  a  sarcous 
body  in  importance  was  slowly  estabhshed,  and  all  mainly  by  the 
Resurrection.  Faith  was  the  organ  of  things  unseen ;  virtue  was  other- 
world  conduct.  This  life  was  mean  and  transitory.  The  other  world 
had  conquered  this.  All  interests  here  paled  in  comparison  with  those 
of  the  next  Hfe.  Thus  it  came  to  pass  that  at  first  believers  in  the  new 
faith  not  only  defied  and  challenged  but  often  courted  and  prayed  for 
death.  They  feared  they  were  not  worthy  of  martyrdom,  and  the  ten 
persecutions  from  A.  D.  64  to  303  gave  them  abundant  opportunity  to 
bear  witness  in  the  supreme  way.  The  testimony  of  Tacitus,  Pliny, 
Suetonius,  and  Caecilius  shows  that  the  Christians  early  made  them- 
selves detested  as  infected  with  a  new  malefic  superstition  aggravated 
by  obstinacy  and  contumacy.  They  were  hated  not  so  much  because 
they  injured  the  business  of  astrologers,  shrine-makers,  gladiators,  and 
the  rest,  as  because  their  faith  was  not  to  them  one  of  many,  but  so 
exclusive  and  supreme  that  they  would  gladly  die  to  advance  it.  Thus, 
Jesus'  followers  soon  came  to  defy,  taunt,  and  even  woo  death.  They 
gloated  over  the  details  of  the  charnel-house  and  worms.  They  lived 
in  tombs,  and  developed  the  catacombs,  those  of  Rome  having  hun- 
dreds of  miles  of  passages.  TertuUian  said  all  Christians  should  die 
the  death  of  martyrs  at  the  end.  Those  who  died  with  Christ  would 
rise  with  him.  Martyrdom  was  a  prize,  a  great  treasure,  an  honour, 
a  kind  of  diploma  summa  cum  laude.  Death  was  despised,  fled  to; 
it  was  the  muse  that  inspired  to  great  deeds.  Its  worst  forms  were  no 
longer  hated  but  preferred.  It  was  no  mere  thanatopsis  or  dreamy 
contemplation  of  euthanasia,  but  to  achieve  a  glorious  death  was  the 
goal  which  many  attained  of  whom  we  know  nothing  else.  Often 
men  and  tender  women  agonized  as  to  whether  they  were  worthy  of 
the  honour  of  the  most  horrid  forms  of  death.  Thus  the  newly  discov- 
ered continent  seemed  infinitely  fairer,  more  lasting,  more  charming, 
than  the  old  hated  world  of  sense,  and  the  great  enemy  was  met  no 
longer  with  Stoic  apathy  but  was  coveted  and  craved.  It  was  the  es- 
sential part  of  man  that  survived,  the  only  thing  of  moment,  when  the 
veil  of  the  body  was  sloughed  off.  The  soul  was  no  longer  regarded 
as  a  mere  harmony,  a  vapour  Hable  to  be  blown  away  if  one  died  on  a 

*H.  Gtmkel:  "Die  Wiikungen  dea  heilisen  Gmtes."    tad  ed.,  Oflttingeo,  1899. 


6^2  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

windy  day,  but  as  the  very  man  himself.  Besides  the  mortal  part 
there  was  the  spiritual  body  which  went  to  the  home  of  souls.  Thus 
the  psychology  of  the  early  Christians  was  not  without  a  soul.  It  was 
no  mere  parallelism  but  was  instinct  with  futurity,  and  so  protensive 
withal  that  agnosticism  had  no  place.  Never  before  nor  since  has  the 
soul  seemed  so  supremely  important. 

The  lust  for  another  life,  or  the  horror  of  extinction,  is  so  old  and  so 
all-pervading  that  it  has  greatly  perverted  man's  desire  to  know  him- 
self. When,  however,  we  study  this  lust  for  immortality  dispassion- 
ately, we  have  reason  to  beHeve  that  the  dread  and  pathos  of  it  all 
is  that  man  still  dies  so  young.  If  we  lived  to  an  old  age,  not  of 
Methusalemic  or  even  Metschnikoffian  span;  and  died  symmetrically, 
not  by  the  premature  failure  of  some  one  organ  or  function;  if  thus 
we  knew  senescence  as  fully  as  we  do  adolescence,  we  should  find  that 
the  lust  for  life  would  be  slowly  supplanted  by  an  equally  strong 
counter-will  to  die.  Indeed,  we  might  seek  death  actively  as  we  now 
do  life,  and  regard  it  as  the  greatest  blessing.  In  that  case  there  would 
be  no  immortality  mania,  for  we  should  be  satisfied  with  life  here, 
without  wanting  a  sequel  to  it,  and  dreams  of  post-mortem  existence 
would  become  a  nightmare.  True  macrobiotism  means  not  only 
more  years  and  completeness  of  experience  but  especially  absence  of 
repression.  Had  we  lived  through  the  whole  comedie  humaine  and 
drunk  all  the  drafts  of  bitter  and  sweet  that  were  ever  brewed  for  man, 
we  should  never  want  to  repeat  any  part  of  such  experience.  The 
fact  is,  man  is  now  cut  off  in  his  prime  with  most  of  the  best  things 
in  him  repressed  and  unrealized.  He  is  a  pathetic  creature  doomed  to 
a  kind  of  Herodian  slaughter.  He  has  felt  this  dimly,  and  so  has 
always  cried  to  the  gods  and  to  nature  to  have  mercy.  He  has  fancied 
answers  to  the  heartrending  appeals  which  he  shouted  into  the  void, 
and  on  their  warrant  has  supplemented  this  life  by  another.  When 
we  psychoanalyze  this  conviction,  we  find  that  at  bottom  it  is  a  sense 
that  the  human  race  is  unfinished  and  that  the  best  is  yet  to  come. 
Man's  future  on  this  earth  is  the  only  real,  glorious,  and  sufficient 
fulfilment  of  this  hope  in  the  prolonged  and  rich  life  of  posterity  here. 
The  man  of  the  future  will  live  himself  out  so  that  nothing  essentially 
human  will  be  foreign  to  his  own  experience.  The  desire  for  immortal- 
ity, therefore,  is  at  bottom  the  best  possible  indication  that  man  as  he 
exists  to-day  is  only  the  beginning  of  what  he  is  to  be,  the  pigmoid 


DEATH  AND  RESURRECTION  OF  JESUS  [693 

or  embryo  of  his  true  self.  When  he  has  completed  and  finished  all 
that  is  now  only  begun  in  him,  many  transcendental  structures  will 
become  useless.  Thus  doctrines  of  another  Ufe,  whatever  else  they 
are,  we  may  still  regard  as  symbols  or  tropes  in  mythic  terms  of  the 
true  superman  as  he  will  be  and  the  great  hope  that  so  many  have 
lived  and  died  in  will  be  fulfilled,  every  jot  and  tittle  of  it.  The 
deathbed  visions  of  those  who  died  hungering  for  more  life  will  come 
true. 

Another  point  of  the  greatest  importance  is  that  the  old  lust  for 
personal  immortahty  has  now  made  man  much  more  anxious  to  pro- 
long and  enlarge  his  mundane  life.  The  great  and  good  things  he 
expected  beyond  he  now  strives  to  attain  here.  He  wants  more,  not 
less,  as  of  old  in  this  life,  because  he  expected  so  much  in  the  other, 
so  that  the  old  belief  in  immortahty  is  one  of  the  analytic  roots  of 
hygiene  and  orthobiosis. 

Just  as  sense  is  the  organ  of  the  physical  world  so  faith  is  the  inner 
sensory  of  the  true  soul  world.  It  was  indeed  the  very  substance  of 
things  hoped  for  and  the  evidence  of  things  not  seen.  The  Holy  Ghost, 
which  was  its  supreme  manifestation,  was  a  new  muse  and  organ  of 
communication  with  the  next  world,  and  superior  to  the  lower  faculties 
of  sense  and  reason,  which  were  despised  as  filthy  rags,  just  as  the  moral- 
ity of  this  world  was  regarded  from  the  standpoint  of  supermundane 
morals.  Thus  ideals  became  more  real  than  facts;  the  visible  Church 
was  plastic  to,  and  moulded  by,  the  invisible  Church.  The  laws  of  this 
world  differed  from  those  of  the  new  and  higher  one  now  revealed. 
The  two  world  orders  collided,  and  what  seemed  miraculous  here  was 
natural  there  because  the  lower  must  give  way  to  the  higher.  This 
earth  was  given  over  to  evil  and  to  destruction.  Worship  was  the 
purest,  other-world  conduct,  the  avocation  of  heaven.  No  real  evil 
could,  indeed,  befall  a  good  man,  living  or  dead,  if  he  were  good  in  this 
sense. 

No  wonder,  therefore,  that  this  evangel  of  a  new  impending  king- 
dom and  dispensation  was  heralded  by  a  kind  of  hurrah  preaching. 
The  Church  was  the  best  image  of  heaven  and  suggestive  of  it;  was  the 
ante-room  through  which  all  must  pass  to  arrive  there.  Individuality 
was  given  an  intensification  immeasurable,  unprecedented,  and  of  tran- 
scendent value.  In  this  new  dualism  the  Jenseits  was  so  superior  to 
the  Diesseits  that  all  the  scales  of  value  were  reversed,  and  all  the 


694  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

troubles,  disorders,  and  ruinations  of  the  period  impelled  the  soul  to 
fly  to  and  live  by  anticipation  in  its  home  above.  Cyprian  had  some 
almost  fulsome  encomiums  upon  martyrdom  which  Cruttwell^  bUndly 
calls  "a  strange  symptom  of  that  unhappy  age."  It  was  really  the 
most  natural  and  inevitable  result  of  a  fixed  and  literal  belief  in  the 
Resurrection  and  all  that  it  implied.  The  passionate  thirst  for  martyr- 
dom made  it  thought  by  many  the  very  best  gift  they  could  render  to 
God,  and  they  went  far  out  of  their  way  to  provoke  it.  Men  rushed  to 
death  with  a  cheer,  which  to  the  Romans  seemed  a  blind  fanaticism 
because  they  could  not  understand  it  to  be  anything  but  sheer  obstinacy 
that  men  would  refuse  to  cry  "Lord  Caesar,"  or  burn  a  grain  of  frankin- 
cense on  the  altar.  TertuUian  praised  martyrdom  as  a  second  baptism 
in  blood  with  very  peculiar  power  to  wash  away  post-baptismal  guilt 
otherwise  very  hard  to  remove.  He  even  laid  down  what  might  almost 
be  called  rules  of  etiquette  for  martyrs,  who  must  not  shriek  when  wild 
beasts  come  upon  them,  etc.  He  exhorted  men  to  be  witnesses,  thus 
praising  those  blessed  ones  who,  crouching  in  gloomy  prisons,  awaited 
the  martyr's  crown.  Even  to  Clement,  who  was  a  little  more  unsym- 
pathetic with  this  passion  or  mania,  a  martyr  was  a  confessor. 

Thus  within  the  space  of  three  days,  or  at  most  some  fifty  days 
from  Calvary  to  Pentecost,  we  have  a  great  tide  from  the  ebb  of 
depression  to  the  flood  of  euphoria.  The  katabasis  of  humiliation, 
shame,  and  suffering  was  followed  by  the  anabasis  of  exaltation,  glory, 
and  Resurrection.  Never  was  there  such  a  flood  from  the  depths  to 
the  heights  of  human  experience  in  its  fluctuations  between  its  two 
great  poles  of  pleasure  and  pain.  Even  Jesus'  earthly  fife  had  two 
sides,  well  illustrated  by  the  two  works  of  Wiinsche,^  as  we  have  seen, 
in  one  of  which  he  is  described  as  suffering,  solitary,  misunderstood  by 
his  mother  ever  after  his  first  visit  to  the  temple,  by  his  contemporaries 
and  even  his  chosen  disciples,  and  in  the  other  as  jubilant  and  trium- 
phant. The  soul  is  normally  poised  between  these  extremes,  and  when 
the  balance  is  lost  in  either  direction  tends  to  react  toward  the  other. 
The  high  hopes  of  years  in  the  breasts  of  the  disciples  could  not  be 
permanently  crushed  by  one  series  of  calamities,  however  appalling, 
and  any  objective  intimation  of  resurgence  would  be  reinforced  by  this 
psychodynamic  principle.    Ever  since  Magnan's  important  studies  in 


»"Literary  History  of  Early  Chriitianity."  1893.    a  vola 

•See  "Die  Leiden  desMessias."     1870.    Corapareit  with  "Derleb«ifreu«g«  Jwu*."    i8r«. 


DEATH  AND  RESURRECTION  OF  JESUS  695 

psychiatry  J  alienists  are  increasingly  prone  to  lay  stress  upon  depressive 
or  melancholiac  as  contrasted  with  exalted  states  of  consciousness,  as 
succeeding  each  other  in  the  so-called  cychc  forms  of  insanity,  into 
either  one  of  which  the  patient,  after  losing  the  power  of  reacting  to  the 
other,  may  settle  with  relative  permanence.  Even  moods  of  joy  and 
sorrow  have  different  mental  horizons  and  may  take  the  form  of  some- 
thing almost  like  dual  personality.  The  healthy  soul,  however,  is 
marked  by  the  power  of  resihence.  To  explore  the  possibilities  of 
human  experience  each  way,  both  up  and  down,  gives  breadth,  range, 
and,  in  a  word,  humanism.  The  plastic  soul  of  adolescence  is  peculiarly 
prone  to  oscillate  from  the  pain  field  to  the  pleasure  field,  and  thereby 
strengthens  and  tempers  itself,  insures  sanity  and  poise,  and  makes 
recovery  from  the  vicissitudes  of  fortune  a  habit  or  diathesis.  No 
experience  of  the  ordinary  individual  sounds  such  extremes  of  misery 
and  rapture  as  is  presented  at  this  epoch.  To  have  fully  realized  the 
possibihty  of  this  great  experience  cadences  the  soul;  gives  it  immunity 
against  the  danger  of  being  overwhelmed  by  woe  or  enervated  by  joy. 
Having  been  thus  seasoned,  man  is  initiated  into  life  and  inoculated 
with  saving  heart-power  against  all  the  ills  that  may  befall.  For  those 
with  vitality  to  react,  the  greater  the  depression  below  the  algedonic  in- 
difference point,  the  higher  and  the  easier  the  ascent  above  it.  To 
be  helped  by  an  external  norm  to  this  reaction  gives  temper  to  the  soul, 
and  to  have  suffered  and  rejoiced  vicariously  up  to  the  full  measure  of  its 
possibilities  is  the  best  initiation  into  Hfe  and  the  best  safeguard  against 
arrest  at  either  extreme  point  of  the  pendulum.  It  is  thus  that  the 
soul  expatiates  over  the  widest  ranges  of  human  experience.  The 
psychologist  marvels  at  and  applauds  alike  the  affirmative  vigour  that 
kept  Jesus'  disciples  from  being  so  overwhelmed  at  his  death  that 
they  could  not  accept  and  exult  in  his  Resurrection,  and  the  tem- 
perance that  restrained  the  exuberant  and  almost  frenzied  enthusiasm 
of  Pentecost  from  the  sibylhne,  maenadic  madness  that  threatened  it, 
formulated  this  exuberance  into  the  doctrines  of  inspiration  and  the 
Holy  Ghost,  checked  the  impetuous  zeal  to  bear  witness  by  death,  and 
diverted  all  this  spring  flood  of  energy  to  the  practical  work  of  preach- 
ing and  organizing.    Both  ways  lay  danger. 

Again,  death  is  always  hard  to  conceive  of  or  even  to  accept  as  a 
fact.  The  personality  of  our  friends  is  a  very  persistent  force  and, 
moreover,  it  is  peculiarly  difficult  to  conceive  a  negation.    The  reality 


696  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

of  dead  friends  is  a  persistent  presence,  a  momentum  which  if  we  close 
our  eyes  to  their  vacant  places  will  bring  them  back.  The  best  ex- 
planation we  have  of  all  kinds  of  funeral  ceremonials  is  that  they  origi- 
nated at  least  in  large  part  as  modes  of  bringing  home  to  mourners  the 
fact  that  their  friends  were  really  dead  and  would  never  be  seen  more. 
Ghosts  haunt  relatives  if  they  have  not  been  properly  buried,  so  that 
the  last  sad  rites  are  to  lay  spirits  by  acting  upon  the  survivors'  minds 
so  strongly  that  neither  waking  nor  asleep  shall  they  fail  to  realize  that 
they  are  no  more.  Presence  at  a  deathbed  also  impresses  the  same 
sad  fact.  The  apostles  were  far  away  from  the  cross  and  the  tomb. 
None  of  them  knew  probably  by  sense,  but  only  by  testimony,  of  their 
Master's  death  and  burial,  so  that  it  is  less  strange  if  he  appeared 
to  them  on  the  ground  of  his  power  and  triumph  in  Galilee  and  amid 
the  familiar  scenes  with  which  they  were  wont  to  associate  him.  They 
had  not  seen  him  dead  or  dying,  and  so  lacked  this  corrective  of  old 
memories,  this  rectification  of  old  associations. 

Again,  strong  personalities,  especially,  die  hard  to  their  friends. 
They  have  filled  so  large  a  space  in  heart,  head,  and  will,  and  the  soul  so 
abhors  this  kind  of  vacuum  made  by  death  that  it  is  almost  a  part  of  the 
vis  medicatrix  naturae  to  restore  the  wounded  psychic  tissue  and  rein- 
state the  loved  ones  again  to  life.  Those  who  polarize  and  give  new 
directions  to  fives,  who  sustain  hope,  inspire  courage,  open  vast  mental 
vistas,  have  an  inextinguishable  post-mortem  existence  for  those  about 
them,  which,  in  these  democratic  days  when  impulse,  knowledge,  feel- 
ing are  stirred  by  so  many  persons  and  are  so  rarely  f  ocussed  upon  one 
fife,  we  hear  Httle  of.  Hegel  and  Baur  have  both  insisted  that  the 
Resurrection  of  Jesus  consisted  essentially  in  this  kind  of  faith  and  love 
of  the  members  of  his  immediate  circle. 

Moreover,  love  always  predisposes  the  soul  to  doubt  death.  It  is 
excited  in  almost  direct  proportion  to  the  worth  and  perdurable  reafity 
of  its  object.  Affection  naturally  chooses  not  the  transient  and  ephem- 
eral, but  the  abiding;  and  conversely  when  it  is  chosen  it  generates 
toward  its  object  a  sense  of  permanence  and  stability.  Thus  love  con- 
quers death. 

Once  more,  mythopeic  forces  preform  and  predetermine  the  direc- 
tion of  psychic  activities  in  great  crises.  Myth  abounds  in  rescues 
of  the  souls  of  the  dead  from  their  abodes,  and  this  general  restitution 
motive  is  itself  preformed  by  the  change  of  seasons.    As  the  Aryan 


DEATH  AND  RESURRECTION  OF  JESUS  697 

races  penetrated  the  colder  regions,  these  myths  became  more  real,  and 
m  Balder's  death  and  attempted  rescue  we  have  the  same  ground 
motive  with  many  identical  psychic  elements  and  effects.  Balder  was 
the  god  of  summer,  who  dies  in  the  fall  and  comes  back  in  the  spring, 
and  not  only  the  Easter  season  itself  but  many  of  the  popular  and  even 
Church  ceremonies  commemorative  of  Jesus'  return  are  borrowed  from 
pagan  folklore  and  custom.  If  not  in  the  narrative  itself,  still  in  the 
hold  which  this  event  has  upon  the  heart  of  Christendom  and  in  many 
of  our  reactions  to  it,  there  are  abundant  reverberations  of  psychoses 
that  long  antedate  Christianity.  The  psychologist,  too,  must  never 
forget  that  the  human  soul  in  its  unconscious  ranges,  which  are  so 
much  vaster  than  all  that  appears  in  the  field  of  consciousness,  often 
treasures  uncomely  beliefs  as  blindly  as  insects  cherish  their  sometimes 
ugly  larvae,  dimly  feeling  their  future  racial  utiHty.  One  of  the  marvels 
of  Christianity  is  that  some  of  its  possessions,  now  understood  and 
glowing  with  Hght,  were  so  tenaciously  clung  to  when  they  seem  to  us 
to  have  been  only  a  mouthful  of  empty  phrases,  or  senseless  or  absurd 
rites.  Classical  legends  and  ceremonials  are  far  more  comely.  But  the 
soul  is  far  wiser  and  truer  than  it  knows,  and  clung  to  what  concealed 
worth  for  itself  through  dark  ages  and  persecutions  in  a  way  which  our 
philosophy  is  too  small  to  explain  and  which  should  forever  make  us 
treat  even  superstition  and  the  blindest  and  narrowest  orthodoxies 
with  sympathy  and,  if  possible,  with  the  hebamic  art  which  Socrates 
praised. 

Psychology  does  not  pronounce  on  the  historicity  of  the  Resurrec- 
tion as  an  objective  fact,  but  it  magnifies  the  unquestioned  behef  in  it 
which  became  ineluctable  and  the  chief  source  of  power  in  the  early 
Church.  Of  all  the  possible  issues  noted  above,  while  Jesus  lay  in  the 
tomb,  only  one  was  inevitable,  and  that  was  that  the  normal  soul 
would  react  from  despair,  and  if  it  did  not  find,  would  invent,  sources  of 
consolation.  Had  the  evidence  of  the  Resurrection  been  still  less  or  a 
mere  suggestion,  there  lies  in  the  depths  of  human  nature  a  power  of 
affirmation  that  would  have  found  some  rehef  and  might  have  given  the 
body  of  faith  to  even  a  suggestion.  The  power  of  belief  without  sight 
or  any  evidence  that  would  satisfy  logical  criteria  was  truly  and  wisely 
praised.  This  is  not  quite  saying  that  the  soul  would  have  affirmed 
the  Resurrection  had  it  not  occurred  in  fact,  but  it  is  asserting  that  the 
nature  of  both  the  individual  and  the  folk-soul  would  strongly  tend  to 


698  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

reinforce  any  degree  of  belief  in  that  direction,  would  find  judicial 
impartiality  difficult,  and  would  make  every  hint  and  hope  a  little  more 
tangible  or  emphatic.  This  view  at  least  gives  added  dignity  to  the 
soul,  gives  it  some  share  in  the  great  crisis  of  Christendom,  endows  it 
with  greater  powers  of  appreciation  of  what  occurred,  and  makes  his- 
toric events  more  cognate  with  its  own  mythopeic  powers,  however 
wide  the  interval  between  the  abihty  to  sympathize  with  and  to  create. 
From  this  point  of  view,  some  new  light  is  shed  upon  the  way  of  salva- 
tion. 

Our  age  has  forgotten  the  power  of  pathos  and  of  fear.  Comfort 
makes  us  selfish,  and  individuahsm  disintegrates  the  old  solidarity  of 
earlier  primitive  communities.  In  becoming  cosmic  our  sympathy  is 
diluted  and  volatilized  and  our  scholarship  has  failed  to  lay  due  stress 
upon  the  fact  that  in  early  days  both  Christians  and  pagans  shuddered, 
groaned,  and  fainted,  were  convulsed  and  torn  with  an  inner  anguish 
racking  the  frame  with  intense  physical  symptoms  as  the  story  of  the 
cross  and  all  that  led  up  to  it  were  vividly  depicted  for  the  first  time  or 
rehearsed  in  solitary  meditation.  So,  too,  learning  has  been  so  occupied 
with  the  spade,  with  ancient  codices  and  attempts  to  reproduce  ob- 
jective facts,  that  it  has  forgotten  those  that  were  inward  and  tempera- 
mental. It  is  increasingly  hard  for  us  to  put  ourselves  in  the  place  of 
simple  minds  before  the  dawn  of  science,  minds  capable  of  believing 
literally  and  with  such  utter  abandon  that  Jesus  had  arisen,  that  they 
could  cast  off  all  fear  of  death,  had  to  be  restrained  with  difficulty  from 
rushing  precipitately  into  its  arms  with  joy,  and  truly  and  practically 
felt  as  even  the  believer  to-day  does  not  and  cannot,  that  the  next  life 
was  infinitely  vaster,  more  real  and  sure  than  this.  But  the  inner 
history  of  Christianity  will  continue  to  have  a  great  and  aching  void 
until  some  work  of  psychic  reconstruction  can  be  effected  here. 

The  effects  of  the  belief  in  the  Resurrection  must  at  once  have 
given  a  new  lustre  to  Jesus'  life.  Every  word  and  incident  must  have 
been  reinterpreted  in  the  light  of  the  new  fame  with  which  he  was  thus 
invested.  It  illuminated  and  transfigured  all.  Had  he  been  a  common, 
average  man,  everything  about  his  personality  would  have  glowed  with 
new  and  hidden  meanings  and  been  invested  with  mystery  and  awe. 
Paul  had  one  incalculable  advantage  over  the  disciples.  His  first 
impressions  of  Jesus  were  as  one  who  had  already  arisen  and  even 
ascended,  and  from  the  apperception  point  of  his  glory  he  studied  his 


DEATH  AND  RESURRECTION  OF  JESUS  699 

life  and  sayings.  His  own  faith  and  teaching  were  conditioned  upon 
the  Resurrection,  without  which  all  would  have  been  vain.  The 
disciples,  however,  knew  him  in  the  plain,  prosaic,  everyday  Hfe  of 
humanity.  They  had  talked,  walked,  and  eaten  with  him,  and  had 
been  his  companions  by  day  and  night.  The  text  shows  the  difficulty 
of  readjustment  of  their  own  personal  experiences  with  him  to  the 
conceptions  of  the  risen  and  glorified  one.  To  bring  unity  into  their 
minds  they  must  tend  to  more  or  less  level  down  the  post-mortem  to 
the  ante-mortem  life,  while  in  Paul  the  converse  process  of  levelling  up 
would  occur.  In  him,  faith  was  all ;  in  them,  sight  dominated.  Briggs^ 
even  says,  illustrating  a  haunting  tendency  of  modern  conservatism  to 
make  the  post-  and  ante-mortem  life  intussuscept  with  each  other,  and 
on  evidence  that  must  forever  be  more  or  less  conjectural,  "We  are 
justified,  therefore,  in  the  conclusion  that  we  must  assign  no  incon- 
siderable portion  of  the  teaching  of  Jesus  to  his  appearances  after  his 
Resurrection.  It  is  upon  the  experiences  of  these  forty  days,  as  much 
as  upon  the  year  and  a  half  of  the  previous  ministry  of  Jesus,  that  the 
faith  and  hfe  of  the  apostolic  Church  was  grounded."  We  must  beheve 
it  to  be  in  the  highest  interests  of  Christianity  to  admit  that  the  sequel 
to  Jesus'  life  stands  in  some  very  different  relation  to  the  rehgious  con- 
sciousness from  his  career  before  death.  It  appeals  to  psychic  registers, 
the  difference  between  which  is  somewhat  symbolized  by  those  between 
the  ideal  and  the  real  or  between  the  soul  and  the  body.  Supremely 
precious  as  is  the  former,  and  indispensable  as  it  is  to  the  soul  of  the 
Christian,  it  is  more  exalted,  remote,  aloof,  superhuman,  unincarnate, 
a  middle  term  between  his  humanity  and  the  pleroma  of  his  fuUy  diplo- 
mated  divinity.  To  Paul  it  was  aU  a  vision,  and  his  own  legitimacy 
was  bound  up  in  the  differences  between  prosaic,  common,  sensuous 
experience  and  the  ecstatic  state.  Both  he  and  the  disciples  were  very 
conscious  of  the  differences  between  his  soul  facts  and  experiences  and 
their  sense  memories.  The  risen  Jesus  is  a  hovering,  iridescent  reahty, 
to  be  regarded  a  Uttle  more  as  we  ought  to  regard  the  supremest  and 
most  inspired  of  all  creations  of  art,  and  is  not  exalted  but  in  danger  of 
being  a  httle  besmirched  by  too  much  peering  criticism  as  to  times  and 
places,  which  sometimes  only  vulgarizes  the  purely  ideal.  This  the 
Resurrection  ever  was  to  Paul,  because  it  came  to  him  as  a  transcen- 
dental experience,  and  it  must  ever  be  to  us  a  predominantly  psycholog- 

'"New  Light  on  the  Life  of  Jesus."    New  York,  igo4, 134  pp. 


700  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

ical  fact,  truer  to  the  nature  and  needs  of  the  soul  than  to  the  canons 
of  historical  research.  Humanity  has  never  dreamed  of  imitating  or 
sympathizing  with  its  risen  Jesus  as  it  has  so  intensely  done  with  the 
Jesus  of  the  Passion.  Tradition  has  done  Httle  to  amplify  the  very 
scanty  record  between  the  Resurrection  and  the  Ascension  by  apocry- 
pha and  myth,  and  it  has  never  been  a  favourite  theme  of  art.  The 
risen  Jesus  did  not  attract  even  the  disciples,  and  has  always  been 
a  Uttle  uncanny,  and  repellent,  and  heartless,  as  if  he  were  coldly  dis- 
charging a  formal  theological  function,  or  were  but  a  mere  dogma  gal- 
vanized into  only  the  pallid  tenuous  life  of  which  a  dogma  is  capable. 

Thus  there  is  a  new  sense  in  which  we  may  now  say  no  one  is  com- 
plete or  has  attained  full  moral  maturity  who  has  not  passed  through 
an  experience  which  of  old  was  designated  as  dying  and  rising  with 
Jesus.  The  selfish  ego  must  die  and  the  higher  social  self  of  service 
must  arise  from  its  tomb.  The  pre-Christian  mysteries  knew  this, 
and  their  sacredly  secret  rites  which  their  initiates  went  through 
symbolized  death  and  rebirth,  and  contemporary  psychopathologists 
are  well  on  the  way  to  the  revival  of  the  equivalent  of  this  cult  in  their 
therapy.  It  is  only  the  next  step  beyond  what  Dejerine,  Dubois,  and 
Marcinowski  have  already  taken  to  lead  patients  obsessed  with 
personal  anxieties  to  see  their  own  worries  pale  by  sympathetic  reali- 
zation that  their  tribulations  are  not  the  worst  possible,  and  that 
beyond  these  there  is  always  a  great  hope  and  resanification  by  re- 
traversing  with  deep  and  sympathetic  Einfiihlung  to  the  point  of 
abandon  the  successive  steps  by  which  Jesus  passed  through  the  worst 
of  all  conceivable  fates  and  yet  found  at  the  end  the  best  and  highest 
of  all  goals,  finding  in  this  an  immunity  bath,  ensuring  them  against 
being  upset  by  either  extreme  of  pleasure  or  pain,  evil  or  good,  that 
can  befall  man.  This  is  the  consummate  lesson  of  life  and  all  who 
have  not  learned  it  are  incomplete,  inferior,  arrested,  not  socially  sane. 
The  immemorial  past,  back  to  the  old  cadence  of  autumn  and  spring 
time,  amplified  and  enriched  by  the  recensions  of  millennia,  conserves 
for  us  here  its  most  precious  heritage.  The  cults  of  many  pagan  deities 
whose  shrines  excavators  are  now  unearthing  were  groping  toward 
the  same  goal,  and  who  knows  but  that  we  have  here  not  only  a  heal- 
ing formula  for  sin-sick  souls,  but  even  for  neurotics  and  psychotics,  so 
that  Jesus  is  to  be  revealed  in  a  new  sense  as  the  Great  Physician  to  the 
obsessed  in  a  way  which  his  healing  miracles  only  madequately  typify  ? 


DEATH  AND  RESURRECTION  OF  JESUS  701 

One  thing,  however,  is  certain,  viz.,  that  every  degree,  even  the 
shghtest,  of  increased  faith  in  a  future  eternal  life  of  rewards  and  pun- 
ishments for  the  soul  gives  inestimable  support  to  morality.  It  gives 
hedonism  a  wider  range  and  makes  selfishness  transcendent  and  in  some 
sense  intensified.  The  sage  who  is  supremely  bent  upon  saving  his 
own  soul,  who  is  assured  that  this  life  is  only  a  portal  to  the  next,  who 
is  not  merely  indifferent  to  wealth,  fame,  comfort,  and  a  merely  worldly 
prudence,  but  who  regards  death  as  only  disrobing,  finds  it  far  easier  to 
die  than  to  swerve  from  his  convictions  of  right.  The  Resurrection 
estabUshed  the  behef  in  the  soul  as  infinitely  more  real  than  the  body, 
not  only  surviving  it  but  relieved  and  glorified  by  emancipation  from  it. 
Thus  convinced,  the  motive  of  action  to  save  life  is  reduced  to  its 
minimum,  the  supreme  fear  of  death  vanishes,  and  man  can  live  out 
the  impulsions  of  his  inner  vocation  for  their  own  sake.  Of  course  the 
lust  for  individual  survival  in  the  next  world  is  not  the  highest  motive 
of  virtue.  It  is  a  utiHtarian  making  the  best  of  two  worlds  instead  of 
one.  There  is  a  sublime  autonomous  sense  of  oughtness  in  the  soul 
that  points,  like  a  magnet  to  the  pole,  to  the  destiny  of  the  human  race 
and  that  differs  widely  from  even  the  highest  form  of  transcendental 
selfishness.  This  Paul  glimpsed  when  he  said  that  under  certain  con- 
ditions he  might  almost  wish  himself  accursed.  But  by  bringing  im- 
mortality to  light,  the  soul  stood  forth  revealed,  and  a  utilitarianism  for 
its  larger  fife  after  death  was  an  incalculable  gain,  the  full  benefit  of 
which,  ineffably  as  it  has  advanced  all  good  causes  m  the  Christian 
world,  is  yet  far  above  the  level  of  hfe  which  the  race  has  yet  attained. 
It  gave  the  greatest  transvaluation  of  all  worths  and  reinforced  every 
ethical  motive. 

Ill 

What  is  belief  in  the  Resurrection  or  what  does  it  involve  and 
mean  to  psychology?  The  answer  is,  as  questionnaire  returns  plainly 
show,  that  it  means  very  different  things  to  different  believers  whose 
lives  seem  equally  devoted  to  the  Master  and  who  have  long  used  the 
same  formula  or  symbol.  It  is  a  very  complex  belief  involving  often 
elements  that  are  so  flagrantly  contradictory  the  one  with  the  other 
that  the  least  examination  of  it  brings  immediate  reconstruction  with 
the  mingled  pain  and  gain  so  peculiar  to  religious  progress.  There  are 
archaic  but  still  persistent  factors  of  this  belief  which  popular  Christi- 


702  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

anity  often  assumes  but  which  no  disciple  of  Jesus,  ancient  or  modern, 
no  martyr,  no  candid  professor  of  theology,  or  really  religious  soul  ever 
did  or  can  attain,  and  there  are  vulgar  standards  of  orthodoxy  so  crassly 
material  and  self-contradictory  that  no  one,  I  will  not  say  with  mere 
learning  or  scholarship  or  with  only  emotional  or  rhetorical  power,  but 
no  one  who  has  power  of  thought  or  real  psychological  insight  or  the 
instinct  to  organize  his  own  soul  coherently  or  logically,  or  who  keeps 
an  intellectual  conscience,  can  possibly  hold  and  be  a  truly  honest  man. 
The  data  of  our  returns  may  be  roughly  grouped  as  follows: 
(a)  Many  think  they  believe  in  it  as  a  Hteral  fact  because  they  have 
never  candidly  examined  the  nature  of  their  affirmation  of  it.  This 
few  can  do,  and  still  fewer  do.  Some  fear  disillusion  or  dread  the  la- 
bour of  reconstruction.  As  Albertus  Magnus  and  Aquinas  carefully 
reserved  certain  dogmas  from  the  sphere  of  philosophic  thought,  so 
this  psychic  process  is  set  apart  as  too  sacred  for  investigation,  (b) 
Many  have  some  degree  of  faith  in  too  crude  a  form  of  it  even  to  be 
able  to'attain  the  full  conviction  they  crave,  and  so  are  unhappy,  halt- 
ing and  praying  for  more  faith  when  they  ought  to  reinterpret  it  into  a 
form  the  mature  modern  mind  demands,  (c)  Others  think  they  find 
aid  to  their  own  faith  by  vociferous  and  dogmatic  affirmation  of  some 
form  of  it,  or  find  their  own  behef  reinforced  by  censuring  what  they 
deem  shortages  or  errors  in  the  belief  of  others,  on  psychic  laws  akin 
to  those  which  make  yoimg  Mormons  suspected  of  doubt  reclaimed 
to  faith  by  being  sent  on  missions  to  preach  their  doctrines  among  here- 
tics, and  who  by  becoming  advocates  instead  of  judges  convert  them- 
selves if  no  others,  (d)  Yet  others  with,  and  surprisingly  often  with- 
out, any  knowledge  of  Kant's  critique  of  the  practical  reason  and  its 
postulates,  hold  to  the  conventional  form  of  behef  because  they  think 
its  effects  on  the  conduct  of  thought,  hfe,  or  both,  are  a  higher  criterion 
or  sanction  than  any  which  reason  can  supply.  The  highest  truth  is 
that  which  works  supremely  well,  (e)  Many  hold  to  it  aesthetically. 
Art  has  embodied  it  in  many  forms  that  edify  and  give  a  true  hedonic 
narcosis  and  so  they  have  grown  indifferent  to  historical  validity.  It 
is  venerable,  hallowed  by  association  and  by  a  consensus  so  wide  as  to 
be  itself  sublime.  Moreover,  poetry  is  often  truer  than  fact,  (f) 
Many  think  it  essential  for  the  young,  and  while  they  feel  that  it  is 
outgrown  in  their  own  experience  deem  it  vital,  saving  truth  for  chil- 
dren and  youth,  to  the  needs  of  which  they  subordinate  not  only  their 


DEATH  AND  RESURRECTION  OF  JESUS  703 

own  lives  but  their  convictions,  and  find  a  pedagogic  virtue  in  so  doing 
that  they  reconcile  with  personal  standards  by  often  elaborate  accom- 
modation theories,  (g)  Finally,  a  few  devout  souls  whose  private 
lives  are  consecrated  to  the  imitation  of  Jesus'  life,  and  who  live  for 
good  works,  distinctly  and  consciously  reject  all  forms  of  resurrection. 
Of  these,  some,  chiefly  women,  were  shocked  to  first  realize  their  un- 
belief and  are  more  assiduous  in  practising  the  Christian  graces  as  if  to 
atone  for  a  defect,  while  others,  more  often  men,  have  found  great  satis- 
faction in  their  eclaircissement,  but  believe  they  can  do  most  good  by 
conforming  and  working  in  the  harness  of  conventionality,  or  perhaps 
think  this  an  article  of  faith  best  left  to  lapse  from  the  Christian  con- 
sciousness quietly,  as  they  believe  it  will  do. 

These  are  facts  based,  to  be  sure,  as  yet  on  only  a  few  score  of  hon- 
est cases,  most  of  them  academic  students  and  all  of  them  more  or  less 
active  church  members  who  desire  to  lead  Christian  lives.  More  data 
are,  of  course,  needed,  and  would  no  doubt  show  many  new  varie- 
ties and  different  statistical  proportions.  That  they  are  typical  of  the 
present  state  of  mind  of  thoughtful  youth  in  the  Church,  who  are  pro- 
verbially the  best  material  for  prophecy,  there  can  be  no  doubt.  But 
few,  if  indeed  any,  held  to  a  belief  in  the  Resurrection  that  would  satisfy 
the  conventional  standards  of  orthodoxy  in  the  denomination  to  which 
they  belonged.  This  shows  a  wide  chasm  between  the  latter  and  the 
true  facts  of  inner  religious  life.  To  make  new,  fresh,  close,  and  vital 
contact  with  the  latter  is,  I  believe,  the  most  crying  need  of  Christian 
thought  to-day.  A  psychologist  must  be  pardoned  if  he  finds  one  chief 
cause  of  this  ominous  and  widening  chasm  in  the  astonishing  neglect  to 
provide  for  any  study  of  the  soul  in  institutions  the  business  of  which  is 
to  train  men  for  the  work  of  saving  it,  and  in  the  abstract,  speculative 
and  antiquated  ways  of  teaching  philosophic  subjects  in  institutions  for 
higher  education  generally.  Reserving  fuller  exposition  for  later  arti- 
cles let  us  finally  glance  in  a  preliminary  way  at  the  present  status  of 
opinion  on  the  subject. 

The  passages  in  the  New  Testament  touching  the  Resurrection  are, 
individually  and  collectively,  extremely  unsatisfactory  and  contain 
many  discrepancies  and  contradictions.  First  of  all  there  were,  as 
every  one  knows,  as  mentioned  above,  no  recorded  eye-witnesses  of  the 
process  itself,  as  there  were  in  the  case  of  Lazarus.  We  have  no 
account  of  how  it  occurred.    The  guards  slept,  the  disciples  fled  even 


704  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

before  the  crucifixion,  and  the  proofs  which  appear  chronologically 
first  differ  in  details,  such  as  whether  the  angel  sat,  stood,  was  inside  or 
outside  the  tomb,  etc.  The  number  of  parousias,  the  persons  to  whom, 
and  the  places  in  which,  he  appeared,  have  always  been  difficult  to 
harmonize.  The  quasi-materiaHty  of  the  risen  body,  the  unforetold 
and  unexpected  event  of  his  bodily  presence,  the  tardiness  of  recogni- 
tion— all  show  us  that  we  are  now  in  a  very  different  position  with  re- 
gard to  historic  reality  from  that  afforded  us  by  the  record  of  the  public 
ministry.  Everything  is  hazy,  falsetto,  and  at  every  point  profoundly 
different  from  the  kind  of  evidence  that  modern  coroners  or  medical 
boards  might  furnish.  For  this  reason  alone,  belief  in  the  Resurrection 
must  forever  remain  a  matter  of  faith  or  subjective  conviction,  and 
involve  more  or  less  of  a  salto  mortale  for  the  modern  and  especially  for 
the  scientific  mind.  In  view  of  the  stupendous  nature  of  the  fact 
assumed  it  must  always  remain  more  or  less  incredible,  and  for  every 
one  who  accepts  it  there  will  forever  be  a  real,  though  perhaps  uncon- 
scious, handicap  on  the  energy  of  conviction.  That  the  disciples  and 
immediate  friends  of  Jesus  were  convinced  that  they  had  seen  his 
resurrected  personality  in  some  form,  and  that  this  was  a  source  of 
great  reassurance  and  one  of  the  chief  bases  of  their  preaching,  and 
gave  it  its  chief  momentum,  there  can  be  no  doubt.  It  is,  however, 
now  quite  competent  to  inquire  upon  what  evidence  this  belief  rested. 
(a)  Elemental  as  are  the  considerations  involved,  it  will  remove  a 
great  burden  and  reproach  from  modern  Christian  belief  for  us  to 
recognize  fully  and  honestly  at  the  outset  that  the  Resurrection  can- 
not mean  for  us  to-day  the  reversal  of  the  processes  of  physical  death. 
It  is  a  suicidal  materialization  of  religious  faith  to  hold  to  all  that  this 
implies.  Death  means,  according  to  various  legal  and  physiological 
tests  and  criteria,  the  cessation  of  respiration  and  therefore  of  oxygena- 
tion of  the  blood,  and  the  complete  arrest  of  the  action  of  the  heart. 
The  nervous  system,  it  is  now  believed,  dies  first,  the  cerebral  preced- 
ing the  sympathetic.  Soon  the  glands  and  other  tissues  follow  in  an 
order  determined  by  the  nature  of  the  morbific  or  lethal  process.  Prod- 
ucts of  decomposition  accumulate;  the  blood  coagulates  in  from  half  an 
hour  to  twelve  hours,  depending  upon  the  degree  of  exhaustion;  the  mus- 
cle plasm  hardens  to  cadaveric  rigidity;  and  with  the  gradual  relaxation 
of  rigor  mortis  putrefaction  sets  in.  Before  the  cooling  of  the  body  be- 
gins very  subtle  changes  occur  in  its  protoplasm,  which  is  changed 


DEATH  AND  RESURRECTION  OF  JESUS 


/^i 


from  an  active  state  with  many  elements  of  its  composition  unknown  to 
a  dead  state,  the  constitution  of  which  is  now  pretty  well  made  out. 
Recent  neurological  studies  indicate  momentous  changes  in  the  brain 
neurons.  Reanimation  of  a  grave  corpse  after  three  days  would  mean 
inversion  of  all  this  sequence  of  processes  after  they  had  advanced  so 
far  that  death  by  every  criterion  must  be  pronounced  complete.  Mod- 
ern definitions  and  conceptions  of  death  make  the  idea  of  revivification 
indefinitely  harder  than  it  was  before  the  development  of  modern  physi- 
ology, especially  its  chemical  section.  Moreover,  the  modern  mind 
must  ask  what  was  the  condition  of  the  wounds,  whether  they  had 
cicatrized,  whether  the  spilled  blood  had  been  restored  or  there  was 
still  extreme  anaemia.  Was  the  weight  the  same?  From  the  record  it 
appears  that  the  risen  body  was  no  longer  without  spot  or  blemish, 
but  was  at  least  scarred.  It  is  no  pedantic  intrusion,  but  an  irresistible 
query  of  every  judicial  and  especially  scientific  mind,  to  dwell  upon  the 
many  details  of  this  order,  which  are  here  suggested. 

It  is  no  revival  of  the  Humean  argument  to  urge  that  from  the 
nature  of  both  testimony  and  of  miracle  such  a  one  can  never  be  really 
proven,  that  the  beUef  in  any  such  series  of  reversals  of  the  order  of 
nature  must  forever  and  by  every  mind,  no  matter  how  devout  or  im- 
passioned the  instinct  of  its  belief,  remain  more  or  less  superficially 
forced  or  formal.  Fervid  affirmation  of  such  a  faith  is  an  act  of  will 
rather  than  of  deliberate,  deep,  and  poised  intellectual  conviction. 
Its  satisfaction  and  even  sublimity  is  psychologically  akin  to  the 
credo  quia  absurdum  by  which  practical  faith  sometimes  loves  to  stop 
the  mouth  of  reason.  Plato's  imagination  was  creative  and  vivid 
enough  to  describe  the  reversal  of  the  processes  in  nature's  cycle  when 
the  universe  turned  about  with  a  shock  and  revolved  the  other  way, 
when  old  men  rose  out  of  the  dust,  gradually  grew  young,  and  entered 
again  their  mother's  wombs;  but  Pliny's  philosophy  made  it  a  matter 
of  consolation  to  mourning  friends  that  even  the  gods  could  never  raise 
the  dead.  That  faith  in  the  Resurrection  has  often  taken  this  mon- 
strous form  in  crass  and  Hteral  minds  there  can  be  no  doubt,  but  a 
large  view  of  all  the  Pauline  passages  indicates  that  the  sense  in  which 
he  made  the  Christian  faith  vain  if  Christ  be  not  raised  is  not  this. 
Such  a  fact,  so  unique  and  out  of  relation  with  everything  we  know, 
must  forever  be  no  less  antagonistic  to  the  higher  activities  of  faith 
than  it  is  stultifying  to  science  and  common  sense.    Even  if  it  has  ever 


7o6  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

had  any  value,  this  has  ceased  to  exist  for  modem  culture,  and  it  is 
not  only  no  longer  needed  but  is  a  grievous  encumbrance  to  modem 
apologetics.  An  intelligent  man  who  afl&raas  that  he  holds  this  belief 
can  hardly  know  what  intellectual  honesty  means. 

(b)  Another  view  not  unknown  in  earlier  times,  and  also  favoured 
by  several  of  the  most  careful  and  conscientious  modern  Christologists, 
is  that  Jesus  was  not  entirely  dead,  but  was  revived  from  some  form  of 
trance.  Paulus  suggested  that  the  sponge  applied  to  his  lips  may  have 
contained  a  narcotic,  and  intimates  that  when  he  bowed  his  head  upon 
the  cross  he  fainted.  Jung  inclined  to  the  same  view.  Schleierma- 
cher  favoured  the  hypothesis  of  apparent  death.  Brehmke  and  others 
(see  Chapter  2)  thought  he  revived,  and  Hved  and  worked  for  a 
quarter  of  a  century  later  in  obscurity.  Pilate  seemed  astonished  that 
he  died  so  soon.  Hengst  imagines  that  he  may  have  revived  and 
prayed  among  the  hills,  where  he  led  perhaps  a  kind  of  prolonged 
Mahatma  Ufe.  His  own  rare  heahng  powers,  it  has  been  said,  may  have 
been  exercised  upon  himself.  He  was  vigorous,  endowed  with  rare 
vitahty,  and  in  the  prime  of  life,  so  that  he  naturally  would  not  suc- 
cumb easily  to  death.  Moreover,  the  body  was  perfumed,  perhaps 
bandaged  and  possibly  embalmed,  and  treated  according  to  the  surgical 
arts  of  his  day,  else  why  the  hundred  pounds  of  myrrh  and  aloes 
in  John  xix:  39?  One  tradition  reports  that  his  feet  were  not  nailed, 
that  the  spear  wound  was  low  in  the  thigh,  and  therefore  not  necessarily 
fatal.  Medical  records,  to  say  nothing  of  the  traditions  of  Catholic 
saints,  report  cases  of  actual  crucifixion,  where  both  hands  and  feet 
were  pierced,  from  which  recovery  has  been  made.  Modern  resuscita- 
tive  methods,  particularly  in  the  case  of  drowning,  and  the  records  of 
the  gallows,  present  authentic  cases  where  life  has  thus  been  snatched 
from  the  very  jaws  of  death  in  rare  ways.  The  purity  and  sinlessness 
of  his  life,  it  has  been  said,  gave  augmented  vitality,  and  perhaps  the 
earthquake  shocked  him  back  to  life.     (See  Chapter  2,  Sadin.) 

The  history  of  human  hibernation  is  a  strange  chapter,  but  the 
reality  of  its  main  facts  may  be  said  to  be  proven.  Respiration  and 
heart  action  can  be  almost  incredibly  reduced  beyond  the  reach  of 
the  usual  methods  of  detection,  and  subjects  can  be  actually  buried  and 
aroused  again  after  days  and  perhaps  weeks  of  a  high  degree  of  sus- 
pended animation.  In  these  cases  the  processes  of  dissolution,  of 
course,  do  not  supervene  and  there  is  no  death,  one  factor  in  the  very 


DEATH  AND  RESURRECTION  OF  JESUS  707 

conception  of  which  is  the  impossibihty  of  restoration  to  life.  Those 
famiUar  with  the  strange  facts  of  modern  hypnotism,  which  are  ac- 
cepted by  the  most  conservative  psychologists,  know  how  far  death  is 
sometimes  thus  simulated  by  its  brother  sleep.  Even  the  uncontrolled 
sporadic  cases,  where  hysterical  subjects  have  in  imagination  passed 
into  and  long  remained  in  unconscious  and  perhaps  cataleptic  states, 
must  be  weighed  if  this  view  is  to  be  seriously  dealt  with.  The  soul 
m  this  state  may  in  vision  have  visited  the  abode  of  the  dead  and  re- 
turned with  strange  and  vivid  dream  pictures.  All  these  phenomena 
are  now  more  or  less  understood. 

If  this  be  the  hypothesis  we  could  partially  explain  the  changed 
appearance  of  Jesus  after  this  exhausting  experience.  We  should  ex- 
pect hrni  to  be  feeble,  anaemic,  pallid,  hungered,  a  trifle  dazed  and  mys- 
terious to  himself  and  others,  instinctively  seeking  seclusion  and  rest 
for  restoration.  He  would  naturally,  exhausting  though  the  effort 
might  be,  endeavour  to  see  his  friends  again,  so  that  he  must  lapse  back 
again  to  death  indeed.  To  intimate,  as  has  been  done,  that  death  was 
shnulated  in  order  to  be  escaped  is  an  extreme  hypothesis  which  has 
Httle  positive  evidence  to  countenance  it.  It  would,  however,  only  be 
conformable  to  the  promptings  of  the  instinct  of  love  to  appear  as  well 
and  strong  as  one's  condition  allowed  in  the  presence  of  one's  friends. 

If  any  such  hypothesis  as  this  be  accepted,  it  must  not  be  for- 
gotten that  it  is  not  resurrection  in  the  sense  which  the  Church  held  of 
old.  It  would  remain  an  illustration  of  marvellous  vitality,  but  the 
superstitions  of  death  have  always  been  such  that  those  who  were 
believed  thus  to  break  away  from  its  close  embrace  have  always  been 
objects  of  wondering  awe  and  curiosity  rather  more  than  of  love,  de- 
votion, and  service.  Such  an  event  must  be  regarded  as  more  or  less 
accidental,  as  suggesting  at  best  a  being  endowed  with  supernormal 
viability,  able  to  resist  causes  of  death  which  would  effectively  over- 
whelm most  men.  It  would  not  add  any  sanction  of  divine  authority, 
would  give  no  warrant  of  a  general  and  real  resurrection  of  others,  but 
would  distinctly  rob  the  death  on  the  cross  of  much  of  its  impressiveness 
and  power.  It  would  be  no  real  confirmation  of  any  interpretation  of 
his  own  prophetic  intimations,  and  could  not  be  a  factor  in  the  r61e 
of  the  Jewish  Messiah.  While  this  view,  therefore,  is  not  impossible 
and  can  never  be  absolutely  disproven  or  proven,  it  has  agamst  it  an 
enormous  improbability,  and  has  little  power  of  edification. 


7o8  JESUS    IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

(c)  From  the  early  times  of  Celsus  down  to  Weisse  and  even 
Keim,  many  have  held  the  parousia  to  be  of  some  higher  and  more 
subtle  form  of  corporeity.  Each  of  the  Christophanies  is  held  to  imply 
some  degree  of  materialization.  There  was  a  real  presence  as  the 
objective  cause  and  at  the  point  de  repere  of  the  vision.  From  the 
standpoint  of  this  theory,  which  Venturini  has  elaborately  exploited, 
the  physical  body  is  not  needed  and  the  grave  might  have  remained 
either  tenanted  or  empty.  It  is  a  heavenly  or  glorified  body  or  form  of 
objectivity,  a  soul  disembodied  "stooping  to  visibiUty,"  or  in  plain 
terms  a  ghost  or  spectre.  This  theory  is  not  without  consonance  with 
some  facts  of  the  record  like  the  passing  through  closed  doors,  the 
sudden  appearance  and  vanishing,  the  appearances  now  in  Jerusalem, 
now  in  Galilee,  the  difficulty  of  recognition,  etc. ;  but  it  hardly  comports 
with  eating,  touching,  speaking,  as  Jesus  did.  To  many  this  view  may 
have  a  certain  new  interest  from  the  recent  studies  of  apparitions  which 
have  convinced  many  cultivated  minds  that  there  may  be  phantasms 
of  the  living  or  dead,  which  are  invested  with  some^form  or  degree  of 
objectivity  and  are  not  wholly  subject  to  the  laws  of  matter.  This  view 
has  b'een  developed,  especially  in  England,  by  a  group  of  bold  spirits 
in  the  Society  for  Psychical  Research,  whose  views  are  far  more  definite 
than  those  of  Seydel,  Scholten,  or  Ewald,  who  also  held  .it.  They  have 
made  a  future  life  seem  more  real  and  true  to  minds  that  claim  no  so- 
called  "mediumistic"  power,  or  indeed  any  supernormal  faculty.  A 
laborious  colligation  of  hundreds  of  dreams  by  Mr.  Gurney  has  erected 
what  is  thought  to  be  a  formidable  presupposition  in  favour  of  a  con- 
tinuance of  mdividual  existence,  at  least  in  an  attenuated  form.  We 
have  been  exhorted  by  Mr.  Myers,  the  coryphaeus  of  this  school,  to 
have  more  resolute  credulity  toward  the  accumxilated  and  systemati- 
cally presented  new  evidence  of  a  physical  basis  of  immortaHty.  Mr. 
Robert  Dale  Owen  long  ago  described  the  "feel"  of  ghost  clothes, 
which  melted  away  in  his  grasp.  We  find,  too,  a  few  cases  of  sensa- 
tions of  spirit  breath  upon  the  cheek.  Appeal  is  also  made  to  a  super- 
normal faculty  of  receiving  personahty  suggestions,  to  some  kind  of 
rare  sensitiveness  which  Mr.  Podmore  says  must  be  either  a  vestige  of 
some  function  of  primordial  organisms  or  else  a  bud  of  powers  later  to 
be  unfolded.  This  faculty,  we  are  told,  may  in  some  way,  difficult  to 
characterize  because  of  the  absence  of  mundane  analogies,  become  ex- 
alted to  a  hallucmatory  state,  which,  however,  has  a  veridical  and 


DEATH  AND  RESURRECTION  OF  JESUS  709 

objective  cause.  This  latter  is  not  a  common  ghost  or  an  astral  body, 
and  indeed  no  physical  process  at  present  known  can  adequately  ex- 
plain its  mode  of  action.  Yet  in  some  way  the  faltering  soul  of  man 
may  be  thus  brought  into  rapport  with  forms  of  individual  existence 
which  have  survived  death,  in  a  way  which  gives  faith  in  a  future  life 
by  actual  communication  with  departed  acquaintances,  and  which 
affords  some  kind  of  answer  to  the  long  and  agonizing  cry  of  the  soul — 
"  If  a  man  die  shall  he  live  again?  "  If  the  future  life  has  a  high  degree 
of  reality  and  those  dead  retain  any  reminiscence  of  earthly  experience, 
the  presumption  that  they  may  find  some  mode  of  revealing  their 
continued  existence  weights  every  die,  and  where  the  air  is  murky  with 
superstition  and  there  are  fabuUsts  and  those  who  strive  and  hunger 
for  this  evidence,  it  seems  strange  that  at  the  very  least  in  a  few  unique 
cases  this  passion  should  not  be  gratified.  The  fact  that  this  theory 
seems  to  modern  science  stupendous  and  revolutionary,  that  it  is 
hardly  susceptible  of  physical  expression  but  must  be  wrought  out  in 
poetic  metaphors  and  has  never  attained  anything  like  true  demon- 
stration, though  those  who  have  struggled  to  make  it  apprehensible 
use  the  theories  of  ether,  neuricity,  and  eccentric  projection  toward 
some  kind  of  objective  correspondence,  even  the  wild  intemperance  of 
spirituahsts  of  every  age  and  clime,  should  not  blind  us  to  the  possibility 
of  some  such  truth  in  a  world  as  yet  but  imperfectly  realized,  in  which 
science  is  still  in  its  infancy  and  man  himself  only  in  an  active  develop- 
mental stage.  For  those  whose  minds  are  not  encumbered  by  critical 
methods  some  such  hypothesis  can  readily  be  developed  which  affords 
a  satisfaction  very  great  and  tranquillizing,  and  for  them  it  is  indefi- 
nitely easier  to  explain  the  whole  class  of  phenomena  by  it  than  to  enter 
tediously  upon  the  indirect  long-circuit  methods  of  critical  testmg  and 
historic  research  which  are  now  demanded  in  this  field. 

On  the  other  hand,  there  are  some  things  which  it  is  a  virtue  to 
doubt.  Superstition  has  no  ranker,  grosser  forms  than  those  due  to  the 
attempts  long  ago  described  by  Kant  to  explain  the  dreams  of  vision- 
aries by  those  of  metaphysicians.  While  it  is  impossible  to  enforce 
temperance  of  thought  upon  this  subject  in  the  popular  religious  mind, 
and  while  it  would  be  the  labours  of  Hercules  over  again  to  drive  out 
from  their  cover  in  the  many  and  vast  fields  of  hypotheses  opened  by 
modern  science  all  the  traces  and  forms  of  these  survivals,  it  is  never- 
theless necessary  to  say  in  unequivocal  terms  that  the  probabilities 


7IO  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

against  a  single  isolated  occurrence  of  this  nature  seem  to  the  natural 
mind  almost  overwhelming.  It  is  not  at  all  impossible,  from  the  fear 
ascribed  to  those  who  saw  the  risen  Jesus  and  from  the  characteristics 
implied  in  these  Christophanies,  that  some  of  the  cited  witnesses 
honestly  believed  that  they  saw  his  ghost.  Indeed,  when  we  consider 
the  frequency  of  such  experiences,  especially  in  the  cases  of  great  and 
beloved  leaders,  and  the  almost  universal  prevalence  of  a  belief  in 
spectres  as  objectively  real,  brought  out  in  so  admirable  and  scholarly 
a  manner  by  H.  Weinel,  it  is  highly  probable  that  this  was  one  of  the 
important  factors  in  the  great  and  sudden  change  from  extreme  de- 
pression to  extreme  joy  and  confidence.  Yet  still  more  we  must  incline 
to  the  view  that  this  interpretation  of  real  experiences  is  more  plausible 
for  earlier  appearances  than  the  theory  of  subjective,  even  if  revelatory, 
vision.  To  the  beUef  that  the  ghost  of  Jesus  had  actually  reappeared 
Christianity  probably  owes  no  small  part  of  its  initial  momentum.  A 
credited  apparition  may  have  had  something  to  do  in  giving  to  the 
early  Christians,  and  through  them  to  the  world,  their  God.  But  even 
if  we  hold  them  to  have  been  in  error  in  this  regard,  we  must  hasten  to 
say  somewhat  as  Fairbairn  said  of  the  vision  theory,  that  at  least  it 
worked  supremely  well.  Men  may  have  once  believed  on  superstitious 
grounds  on  him,  whom  now  the  world  is  coming  to  adore  as  divine  in  a 
higher  sense  than  the  early  Christians  could  comprehend.  We  have 
here  only  an  extreme  illustration  of  the  fact  that  from  age  to  age  the 
basis  and  emphasis  of  beUef  in  Jesus  have  changed,  but  that  he  has 
always  occupied  in  the  souls  of  his  disciples  the  highest  place  which 
every  stage  of  culture  could  provide.  That  even  superstition  was  thus 
made  to  praise  him  is  no  derogation  of  his  merit,  no  stigma  upon  his 
character,  and  should  cause  no  abatement  of  our  own  trust  in  him.  It 
was  not  only  necessary  but  inevitable  that  he  should  impress  those 
about  him  with  a  sense  of  a  reality  and  validity  in  his  own  teachings, 
sentiments,  and  character  that  far  transcended  their  narrow  compre- 
hension. One  form  which  the  conceptions  of  great  men  then  took  was 
that  of  the  superiority,  actuahty,  persistence,  and  power  of  survival 
generally  of  their  souls.  The  ideal  thus  became  real,  the  transcendent 
immanent.  The  plastic,  receptive  power  of  mind,  sense,  and  feeUng 
passed  over  into  the  passionate  enthusiasm  of  will.  The  very  energy 
of  being  which  to-day  makes  a  popular  hero,  a  leader,  and  compeller  of 
souls,  was  then  wont  to  be  appreciated  and  interpreted  as  control  of 


DEATH  AND  RESURRECTION  OF  JESUS  711 

the  powers  beyond  the  grave.  History  cannot  be  written  without 
recognizing  at  some  of  the  most  important  crises  in  human  events  the 
power  of  behef  in  even  the  veridical  nature  of  dreams. 

While,  therefore,  for  us  the  spectre  theory  has  little  of  the  power 
which  Paul  ascribes  to  the  Resurrection,  it  was  by  no  means  devoid 
of  it  in  ancient  days.  It  is  also  well  to  reflect  that  for  those  who  still 
hold  any  form  of  the  hypothesis  of  spiritualism,  credence  in  the  Resur- 
rection of  Jesus  is  an  easy  matter,  for  it  becomes  only  a  highly  special- 
ized and  perhaps  uniquely  preeminent  case  under  a  general  law. 
Just  as  the  same  natural  phenomena  are  interpreted  according  to 
radically  different  theories  in  different  ages,  so  we  have  here  an 
illustration  of  the  progressive  reconstruction  of  the  apperception 
organs  in  man. 

(d)  Far  more  current  now  is  the  vision  theory,  represented  in 
different  forms  by  Spinoza,  Strauss,  Renan,  Seydel,  Raville,  Fichte, 
Geiger,  Noack,  Gratz,  and  others.  For  some  the  Resurrection  is  a 
specially  inspired  vision  sent  by  God.  Some,  Hke  Fichte,  distinguish 
between  visions  that  can  and  that  cannot  be  explained;  or  attempt 
psychological  distinctions  between  imagination,  abnormal  ecstasy,  and 
faith;  hint  at  the  possibility  of  dreaming  either  by  night  or  by  day;  dis- 
tinguish between  visions  self-generated  or  due  to  the  contagion  of 
numbers;  between  visions  vivid  enough  to  cause  complete  behef  in 
their  objective  validity  and  those  that  bring  only  partial  conviction. 
They  expatiate  on  Paul's  diathesis  and  Peter's  ecstatic  experience,  or 
discuss  the  extent  to  which  the  visionary  practices  which  Noack  sug- 
gests even  Jesus  cultivated,  and  which  the  Montanists  afterward 
unfolded,  prevailed  in  the  apostolic  circle  before  and  after  Jesus' 
death.  Renan  calls  Mary  a  visionary,  and  intimates  that  in  her 
person  a  woman  became  the  first  missionary.  There  is  much  con- 
sensus of  opinion  that  Paul  saw  visions;  and  if  he  did  not  rest  his 
claims  to  the  apostolate  upon  them,  nevertheless  he  regarded  them 
as  in  some  sense  a  commission  directly  from  Jesus  to  preach  the 
Gospel. 

The  discrepancy  among  different  writers  in  their  conception  of  the 
psychology  of  vision  and  the  imparity  between  the  different  Christoph- 
anies  for  Paul  himself,  and  between  his  and  those  of  others,  has  its 
root,  perhaps,  in  the  wide  variety  of  experiences  which  the  term  vision 
is  used  to  include.    For  those  who  are  visually  minded,  a  clear  belief 


712  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

readily  takes  the  form  of  an  image  with  contours  and  even  colours. 
In  many  perfectly  sane  persons  there  are  entoptic  experiences  of  visual- 
ization that  may  be  so  entirely  independent  of  the  stream  of  thought  as 
to  seem  objective,  while  in  other  cases  they  give  a  concreteness  to  the 
processes  of  ideation,  almost  as  vivid  as  pictorial  illustration.  Life  at 
twilight  and  during  the  night  is  very  different  from  that  of  the  clear 
day  in  this  respect.  In  darkness  thoughts  create  and  project  objects 
that  often  attain  a  high  degree  of  objective  clearness.  Fechner  has 
well  characterized  the  influence  of  the  night  side  of  life  upon  human 
conduct,  and  modern  psychology  abounds  in  cases  where  illusions  and 
dream  experiences  have  become  definitely  incorporated  into  the  mem- 
ory continuum  as  actually  experienced. 

Moreover,  intense  experiences  involving  great  emotional  stress 
always  tend  to  shift  the  boundaries  between  the  inner  and  the  outer. 
The  sensorium  may  be  anaemic  or  congested,  and  the  perturbation  of  the 
souls  of  the  disciples  in  those  days  has  not  inaptly  been  compared  to 
the  resolution  of  the  world  back  to  some  primitive  cosmic  state  from 
which  it  slowly  cooled  again.  Even  more  frequent  than  visual  is  audi- 
tory hallucination,  and  both  may  be  entirely  consonant  with  mental  san- 
ity and  normality  in  other  respects.  Seeing  visions  has  in  many  persons 
and  in  many  ages  been  a  passion  and  evolved  a  very  definite  cult. 
Many  theories  of  inspiration  have  had  recourse  to  vision  theories.  In 
primitive  ages  there  is  no  such  distinction  between  illusion  and  percep- 
tion as  we  often  find  in  the  early  stages  of  neuro-psychic  disease.  Yet 
the  old  proverb  that  seeing  is  believing  has  a  deep  psychological  truth. 
Helmholtz  has  well  said  that  any  illusion  of  sense  persistently  repeated 
is  certain  in  the  end  to  force  itself  upon  the  acceptance  of  the  mind 
with  full  and  inexpugnable  conviction.  To  have  actually  seen  the 
risen  Jesus  made  belief  in  his  power  over  death  and  all  that  it  impHed 
irresistible,  and  when  reinforced  by  all  the  hopes,  desires,  and  love  of 
his  friends  would  give  this  faith  a  momentum  not  inferior  to  the  su- 
preme cataleptic  certainty  of  the  Stoics  and  would  give  their  preach- 
ing the  impetus  of  tons  instead  of  pounds. 

Mary's  enthusiastic  annunciation  of  the  Resurrection  must  have 
been  the  gladdest  of  all  Gospel  good  tidings.  It  was  news  that  must  be 
spread.  Tongues  grew  aflame  like  Jove's  chariot  wheels  under  the 
impulse  to  spread  the  greatest  and  best  news  ever  proclaimed.  It  was 
simply  tidings  of  a  momentous  and  unique  message  from  the  future 


DEATH  AND  RESURRECTION  OF  JESUS  713 

home  of  all  men,  far  higher  and  farther  above  all  news-mongering  than 
preaching  is  above  gossip.  Paul  underwent  a  radical  reconstruction 
of  standpoint  and  Ufe-purpose  under  its  influence,  and  the  supreme 
duty  of  all  who  had  been  clairvoyant  and  clairaudient  to  the  great 
parousia  was  to  promulgate  the  great  fact,  to  proclaim  it  from  the 
housetop,  to  organize  a  world  propaganda  of  it.  The  Resurrection  was 
the  central  event  in  all  the  universe,  to  which  every  important  preceding 
event  led  up,  in  which  it  focussed,  and  from  which  all  agencies  for  good  in 
the  world  must  henceforth  irradiate.  The  man  Jesus  became  the  Divine 
Christ.  All  his  teachings  obtained  a  sanction  direct  from  God.  The 
Resurrection  was  not  only  the  great  attest  and  credential,  authorizing 
all  his  words  and  giving  the  most  sublime  possible  climax  to  the  tragedy 
of  his  life,  but  it  marked  a  new  era  in  the  relations  of  this  world  to  the 
Supreme  Author  of  all  being.  Thus  I  opine  it  did  not  need,  as  Keim 
holds,  any  definite  closing  of  the  period  of  vision  or  any  authorization 
to  cease  gazing  into  heaven,  to  recover  self-possession,  and  go  to  work. 
There  was  a  spontaneous  and  inevitable  passage  from  a  state  of  con- 
vincing vision  and  passionate  belief  to  enthusiastic  will,  a  great  psycho- 
sis under  the  influence  of  an  unprecedented  train  of  experiences  and  in 
an  age  dominated  by  psychic  forces,  which  never  and  nowhere  else, 
before  or  since,  was  aroused  in  any  such  kind  and  degree.  The  dis- 
ciples, at  least  the  dominant  members  of  their  group,  had  seen.  That 
was  enough  to  henceforth  make  them  all  missionaries,  preaching  that 
which  had  been  actually  seen  and  heard. 

In  fact,  Paul's  conception  of  Christ  had  very  little  to  do  with  the 
earthly  life  of  Jesus.  So  far  as  modern  Christianity  is  Pauline,  it  is 
essentially  unhistoric  so  far  as  both  the  words  and  the  deeds  of  Jesus 
are  concerned,  and  indeed,  has  little  connection  with  the  Jesus  of  the 
synoptic  writers  or  even  with  the  Johannin  Jesus.  Paul's  mind  was 
chiefly  fixed  upon  the  voluntary  humiliation  of  the  preexistent  Jesus 
in  coming  down  to  earth,  taking  on  the  form  of  man  and  submitting  to 
crucifixion.  By  this  supreme  act  of  renunciation,  obedience,  and  love 
he  merited  and  received  the  reward  of  Resurrection  and  Ascension  and 
still  greater  exaltation  at  the  Father's  right  hand  than  he  had  before. 
His  daily  life,  walk,  and  example  constituted  an  otherwise  relatively 
insignificant  episode  in  the  transcendent  being  of  a  preexistent  and 
still  more  lofty  post-existent  state.  Paul  praises  in  many  and  diverse 
paradoxes  the  virtue  of  his  self-emptying  of  celestial  glory  and  taking 


714  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

on  the  humiliation  of  flesh.  In  this  sacrifice  and  self-offering  his 
consenting  to  death  was  involved.^ 

(e)  Perhaps  the  world  has  mistaken  a  group  of  psychological  ex- 
periences, profound  and  of  supreme  historic  significance,  for  plain,  bald 
historic  fact,  but  the  mistake  is  of  far  less  practical  significance  either 
way  than  has  been  thought.  Textual  criticism,  laborious  compilation  of 
contemporaneous  allusions,  the  possible  discovery  of  new  manuscripts  or 
archaeological  inscriptions,  can  never  make  the  apologists  of  the  his- 
torical school  the  chief  authorities  for  the  post-mortem  appearances  of 
Jesus,  and  their  verdicts  will  always  remain  of  limited  effect  upon  the 
souls  of  believers.  But  if  we  insist  that  this  is  all  at  bottom  psychology, 
we  must  also  candidly  admit  that  we  are  here  in  the  presence  of  soul- 
events  which  have  features  that  it  is  hard  to  parallel  in  all  the  records 
of  the  individual  or  the  collective  mind.  Psychology  with  its  special 
sections  on  illusions  of  perception,  on  the  life  of  feeling  and  will,  on  the 
individual  and  the  movements  of  groups  and  races  of  men,  has  yet  much 
to  learn  and  is  still  in  its  infancy,  but  it  is  already  big  with  the  promise 
and  potency  of  larger  and  more  cogent  explanations  here,  which  far 
from  weakening  faith  will  give  it  both  a  higher  sanction  and  a  larger 
scope  with  strict  conformity  to  science. 

How  much  of  it  all  was  due  to  vision  and  how  much  to  other  factors, 
whether  some  disciples  dreamed  while  others  thought  of  ghosts,  espe- 
cially how  many  parts  of  objective  reality  different  individuals  ascribed 
to  their  experiences,  and  just  how  Paul  himself  understood  his  own, 
we  can  never  with  certainty  know.  New  books  and  theories  in  indefi- 
nite perspective  will  continue  to  trim  the  Christian  ship  by  rolling  the 
weight  of  one  or  all  of  these  four  ballast  boxes  to  starboard  or  larboard, 
but  if  anywhere  the  frank  confession  of  ignoramus,  if  not  of  ignorahimus 
is  proper,  it  is  here. 

While,  then,  some  forms  of  belief  in  the  Resurrection  must  be 
definitely  abandoned  as  obstacles  to  faith,  others,  not  one  but  several, 

'See  "Die  Entstehung  der  Paulinschen  Christolope,"  by  Dr.  M.  BrUckner,  Strassburg,  1503,  337  pp.,  which  ex- 
presses essentially  the  thought  of  the  above  paragraph  and  urges  that  Paul  had  from  his  youth  a  very  definite  idea  of  a 
supernatural  Jewish  Messiah,  and  that  his  conversion  consisted  chiefly  in  the  visual  apparition  of  his  ideal  in  a  form  so 
like  the  Resurrection  Jesus  that  the  two  concepts  were  instantly  fused.  At  the  same  time  his  ideal  was  supplemented 
and  enlarged  by  the  kenotic  idea  of  the  episode  of  Incarnation  and  higher  f)ost -ascensional  glory.  _  Thus  ;he  risen  and 
ascended  Jesus  of  Christendom  is  the  highest  idealization  of  the  Jewish  Messiah  of  Paul's  time,  which  included  conflict 
with,  and  victory  over,  demons  and  all  the  supernal  powers  of  evil,  but  now  universalized  and  freed  from  Mosaic  laws 
and  Jewish  limitations  and  given  cosmic  significance.  BrUckncr  does  not  state,  but  very  clearly  leaves  us  to  infer,  that 
had  Paul  known  the  historic  Jesus  it  is  doubtful  if  this  identification  with  his  earlier  Messianic  ideal  would  ever  have 
occurred.  Thus  Paul  sought  to  convert  gentiles  to  the  most  exalted  of  Jewish  ideals,  but  the  nature  and  work,  which 
was  essentially  transcendental  and  connected  with  the  historic  Jesus  only  oy  a  vision  of  identification,  was  later  confirmed 
by  Jewish  metaphysical  speculation.  This  noble  ideal  not  or\\y  became  an  apparition,  but  took  the  form  of  flesh  and 
died  to  provide  a  Jewish  atonement  for  Jewish  law.  This  identification  Is  the  chief  masterpiece  of  religious  genius  in  the 
world,  and  has  in  many  if  not  most  respects  worked  supremely  well,  although  there  is  as  little  intussusception  between 
the  historic  Jesus  and  the  racial  idoU  as  betweea  the  parts  of  the  Image  of  Exeluel's  visioa. 


DEATH  AND  RESURRECTION  OF  JESUS  715 

far  higher  are  not  only  possible  but  inevitable  for  every  large  and  posi- 
tive mind,  instructed  in  the  nature  of  the  individual  and  racial  soul. 
They  neither  can  nor  should  yet  be  formulated  with  definiteness  or 
finality  enough  to  satisfy  those  who  demand  rigid  dogma  or  apodeictic 
demonstration.  The  character  and  teaching  of  Jesus  have  a  supreme 
and  independent  value  of  their  own,  and  his  death  will  ever  work  its 
miracles  of  pathos.  These,  at  least,  will  remain  historic  even  if  the 
Resurrection  be  all  dogma.  If  all  the  precious  worths  that  have  been 
made  in  the  course  of  Christian  centuries  to  depend  upon  the  cruder 
statements  of  the  latter  as  an  assumed  major  premise  for  innumerable 
deductions  be  a  little  imperilled  for  a  time,  psychology  has  within  itself 
possibilities  hitherto  undreamed,  of  both  restatement  of  the  premise 
and  revalidification  of  all  the  values  and  of  thus  re- Christianizing 
Christianity. 

While  the  Jesus  of  what  we  may  call  the  Resurrection  dispensation 
is  undergoing  reconstruction,  the  historic  Jesus  remains  as,  at  least,  the 
true  superman,  prophetic  of  what  the  members  of  our  race  may  attain 
if  it  ever  come  to  its  full  maturity,  the  first  fruits  not  of  those  that  die, 
but  the  first  and  ideal  representation  of  those  who  are  to  live  in  the 
larger  and  more  glorious  future  that,  if  evolution  is  true,  awaits  it. 
If  the  Resurrection  Jesus  is  made  so  material  and  historic  as  to  ecHpse 
the  spiritual  Jesus,  if  he  is  made  so  local  and  temporal  as  to  be  a  mere 
idol  of  the  ever-living  and  ever-present  Emmanuel,  there  is  rehgious 
decadence  and  not  progress.  If  he  whom  Paul  saw  as  a  vision  the 
psychologist  of  the  near  future  shall  find  to  be  more  a  creation  than  a 
mere  object  of  faith,  most  sacred  because  the  first,  highest,  and  purest 
production  of  the  Paraclete  in  the  soul  of  man;  if  the  risen  Jesus  was 
projected  by  this  supreme  muse  solely  to  be,  as  well  as  to  make,  the 
pledge  of  its  abiding  presence  guiding  into  all  truth,  then  he  would  be 
revealed  to  our  distracted  age  as  the  Comforter  indeed.  For  then  not 
only  the  growing  strain  which  the  parousia  put  upon  the  Christian 
thought  of  our  day  would  be  wondrously  eased  and  harmony  in  the 
record  estabHshed,  but  the  work  of  the  Holy  Spirit  would  be  worthily 
inaugurated  in  the  world  as  the  great  spiritualizer  of  life,  and  the  Jesus 
of  the  Resurrection  as  completely  and  entirely  its  first  fruits  would 
shine  forth  with  a  new  light  and  with  infinite  promise  and  potency  for 
all  who  strive  to  attain  true  sonship  with  the  Father. 

This  imperfect  and  sketchy  conflation  of  psychological  viewpoints 


7i6  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

at  least  suggests  something  above  textual  or  historical  criticism  and 
shows  that  these  cannot  be  finalities.  The  latter  have  clearly  shown 
that  even  the  authors  of  our  four  Gospels,  especially  the  unknown 
writer  of  John,  conflated  and  compiled  and  reverently  sought  to  ex- 
plain in  the  light  of  all  the  available  sources,  traditional  and  written, 
what  Jesus  meant  quite  as  much  if  not  more  than  what  he  literally  said 
and  did.  Psychological  criticism  accepts  all  the  records,  somewhat 
as  geology  bases  upon  all  outcrops,  cuts,  mines,  etc.,  and  evolves  from  a 
compilation  of  all  data  the  sequence  of  strata  and  the  development  of 
living  forms  by  collating  all  the  fossils  with  their  most  cognate  Hving 
forms.  So  psychology  demands  a  wider  purview  than  the  New  Testa- 
ment and  the  local  and  temporal  events  associated  with  it,  and  seeks  to 
lay  the  foundations  of  a  larger  faith  that  shall  rest  on  all  that  we  know 
to-day  of  the  facts  and  laws  of  nature  and  still  more  of  the  soul  of  man. 
The  Passion  and  Resurrection  must  to-day  be  discussed  in  view  of 
a  vaster  background  than  the  Old  Testament  afifords,  for  they  are  the 
culminating  redaction  of  the  central  theme  of  many  cults  far  older  than 
they,  all  about  the  eastern  Mediterranean,  each  of  which  contributed 
its  best  elements.  How  the  folk-soul  came  to  make  this  most  impos- 
ing and  precious  synthesis  is  at  once  the  most  stimulating  and  lofty 
of  all  culture  problems,  and  the  new  vistas  that  we  can  already  glimpse 
give  us  the  vastest  and  most  imposing  perspective  into  the  past  of 
man's  psychic  evolution.  Most  superstitions  were  found  in  Rome 
before  Christianity,  which,  unable  to  suppress  them,  purged  them  of 
their  grosser  features  and  syncretized  them.  In  several  localities  in 
Italy,  and  best  of  all  in  Sicily,  Easter  is  still  very  dramatically  cele- 
brated on  the  older  pattern  of  Adonis  worship.  For  instance,  a  wax 
effigy  of  the  dead  Christ  is  exposed  all  through  Good  Friday  in  the 
middle  of  a  Greek  church,  and  is  covered  with  fervent  kisses,  while  the 
church  echoes  with  dirges.  At  nightfall  it  is  carried,  covered  with 
flowers,  in  slow,  solemn  procession  through  the  crowded  streets.  Every 
man  carries  a  taper  and  wails,  while  women  from  every  house  fumigate 
the  image  with  censers.  Thus  the  community  celebrates  the  funeral 
of  Christ  as  if  he  were  just  dead,  and  all  fast  till  midnight  Saturday. 
As  this  hour  strikes  the  bishop  appears  and  announces  that  Christ  has 
risen,  and  the  crowd  responds,  "He  is  risen  indeed."  Then  the 
church  and  soon  the  city  burst  into  an  uproar  of  joy  with  mad  shouts 
and  shrieks.    There  are  volleys  of  cannon  and  musketry  and  fireworks, 


DEATH  AND  RESURRECTION  OF  JESUS  717 

and  the  erstwhile  fasters  fill  themselves  with  meat  and  wine.  Thus 
Catholicism  brings  before  the  susceptible  Southern  races  with  all  possi- 
ble pomp  and  pageantry  the  representation  of  the  death  and  Resurrec- 
tion of  man's  redeemer  from  sin  by  the  very  rites  once  used  to  redeem 
the  earth  from  the  death  of  winter.  Both  the  spade  and  psycho- 
analysis of  the  folk-soul  are  now  unearthing  old,  submerged  symbolic 
strata  which  show  us  that  Adonis,  Attis,  and  Osiris,  though  dead  in 
name,  still  live  wherever  Christianity  Uves.  This  ethnic  background 
so  long  fallow  still  fertilizes  and  enriches  our  own  lives,  and  enables  us 
to  understand  why  Christianity  spread  so  rapidly  among  the  gentiles. 
We  can  even  correlate  these  phenomena  with  the  predominance  of 
suicides  in  the  fall  and  revivals  and  procreations  in  the  spring. 

Ever  since  the  glacial  age  the  soul  of  man  has  been  impressed  with 
the  processional  of  the  seasons.  In  the  spring  the  world  is  clothed 
in  green,  everything  reawakens  or  grows,  food  is  abundant,  and  the 
spirit  of  life  is  resurrected  from  the  death  of  winter.  Conversely  in 
autumn  vegetation  dies,  the  sun  recedes,  there  are  cold  and  ice,  the 
conditions  of  life  grow  hard,  and  nature  seems  dying.  Primitive  man 
must  have  been  awed  by  these  cosmic  tides  and,  especially  with  his 
close  rapport  with  nature,  must  have  watched  for  the  ebb  of  the  ther- 
mal wave.  Thus  it  is  not  strange  that  in  monuments,  myths,  myth- 
ologies, rites,  we  are  rapidly  finding  everywhere  more  and  more  traces 
of  these  changes  and  of  the  magic  by  which  man  of  old  sought  to  con- 
trol them.  Scholarship  in  this  field  is  exhuming  more  and  more  the 
vestiges  of  these  cults.  Man  early  felt  that  this  birth  and  death  of 
nature  were  connected  with  the  waxing  and  waning  figures  of  divine 
beings  who  controlled  them,  and  that  their  energy  might  be  increased 
by  dramatic  representations  of  the  processes  he  wished  to  facilitate. 
The  universal  theme  of  these  dramas  was  thus  death  and  rebirth,  at 
first  chiefly  the  latter  in  the  field  of  vegetation.  Control  came  from 
symbolizing  it,  and  vegetation  is  often  presentified  as  a  god  who  annu- 
ally died  and  arose.  Of  this  theme  there  are  endless  local  variations, 
beginning  with  Adonis,  the  Asiatic  Tammuz,  the  Old  Testament 
Adoni,  My  Lord.  Following  Frazer,  in  ancient  Babylon  he  was  the 
young  spouse  of  Ishtar,  the  great  mother-goddess  of  reproduction. 
Every  year  he  died  and  went  to  the  sad,  dark  regions  below,  where  his 
divine  mistress  followed  him.  During  her  absence  love  died,  repro- 
duction ceased,  and  life  threatened  to  go  out.    Hymns  lamented 


7i8  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

the  departure  of  the  pair,  Hturgies  were  chanted  to  the  efiSgy  of  the 
dead  god,  which  was  washed  in  water,  anointed  with  oil,  clothed  in 
red,  fumigated  with  incense  designed  to  effect  his  resurrection.  Finally 
the  great  god  Ea  himself  sent  a  messenger  to  the  grim  queen  of  the  in- 
ferno, who  at  last  very  reluctantly  sprinkled  the  waters  of  life  upon  the 
pair,  and  they  were  allowed  to  return,  an  J  then  all  nature  revived  with 
springtide  energy.  In  Greece  Adonis  was  a  transcendent  beauty,  be- 
loved by  Aphrodite,  who  in  his  infancy  gave  him  to  Persephone,  queen 
of  Hades.  She,  seeing  his  beauty,  refused  to  give  him  back.  So 
Zeus  decreed  that  he  should  spend  half  of  the  year  with  the  one  goddess 
below  and  the  other  half  in  the  upper  world.  When  he  was  slain 
Aphrodite  bemoaned  him  as-  if  anticipating  the  mater  dolorosa.  Of  this 
species  of  celebration  we  have  many  sub- varieties.  In  Phoenicia  these 
rites  were  very  solemn  and  the  kings  of  Biblus  assumed  the  god's 
name,  as  was  done  in  very  ancient  times  in  Jerusalem.  David  himself 
showed  vestiges  of  this  cult  by  being  held  more  or  less  responsible  for 
drouth,  famine,  and  certain  diseases.  Earth  was  the  great  mother  of 
plants  and  animals,  to  whom  first-fruits  were  offered  and  sons  and 
daughters  devoted,  so  that  trees,  crops,  and  beasts  were  all  children  of 
Baal  and  Astarte.  Once  a  temple  of  Adonis  stood  on  Mount  Lebanon, 
amid  one  of  the  most  impressive  of  all  landscapes,  where  the  whole 
region  has  long  been  haunted  by  traditions  of  the  mangled  body  of 
Adonis  here  buried.  Here  he  was  worshipped  by  Assyrian  damsels 
when  the  river  was  incarnadine,  and  the  sea  fringed  with  anemones, 
which  dyed  them  with  the  blood  of  the  god  untimely  slain.  At  Cy- 
press the  cult  degenerated  to  sanctified  harlotry,  once,  Frazer  says, 
thought  to  be  as  much  a  religious  duty  as  is  now  the  nun's  vow  of  vir- 
ginity. Here  the  worship  was  a  symbol  of  fertility,  and  the  variations 
of  this  cult  and  the  anonymity  of  such  unions  caused  the  offspring  often 
to  be  called  children  of  God.  Sometimes,  as  at  the  temple  of  Epidau- 
rus,  souls  of  the  dead  were  reincarnated,  while  ploughing  and  sowing 
the  earth  are  given  the  same  significance.  Widespread  was  the  cere- 
mony of  burning  Melcarth,  centred  in  Tyre.  In  Sophocles'  drama, 
Hercules  burned  himself  on  a  vast  pyre  on  the  top  of  Mount  (Eta; 
this  was  afterward  annually  repeated  with  his  effigy,  and  the  next  day 
came  the  drama  of  the  awakening  of  Hercules.  Still  farther  back  the 
kings  of  Tyre  personated  Melcarth  and  were  burned  in  effigy  at  an  an- 
nual festival,  later  toned  down  to  a  fire-walk.    So  the  Punic  general, 


DEATH  AND  RESURRECTION  OF  JESUS  719 

Hamilcar,  burned  himself  in  the  old  heroic  way  pro  bono  publico  as  he 
saw  his  army  giving  way,  for  this  was  the  old  method  of  apotheosis. 
The  burning  of  the  Sicilian  Sandan  was  followed  by  a  ceremony  of 
resurrection.  Among  the  Semites  under  this  or  other  names  Adonis 
was  often  personified  by  priestly  kings,  perhaps  originally  put  to  death 
in  their  divine  capacity,  although  later  there  are  mitigating  stages 
and  makebelieves.  In  Alexandria  images  of  Aphrodite  and  Adonis 
celebrated  their  nuptials  on  two  couches  with  manifold  flowers  and 
fruits.  The  next  day  their  death  was  bemoaned  with  streaming  hair 
and  bare  breasts,  and  their  images  were  burned  by  the  sea;  but  they 
always  returned  in  another  ceremony  in  the  spring.  Even  when  the 
Emperor  JuHan  entered  Antioch,  this  great  capital  was  splendid  with 
grief  for  the  mimic  death  of  the  annual  Adonis.  With  the  rise  of  agri- 
culture, the  Adonis  cult  centred  upon  domesticated  plants  and  animals, 
but  still  the  fear  of  hunger  animated  the  entire  vast  cycle  of  Adonis 
worship  all  the  way  from  the  first  edible  wild  fruits  to  the  day  of  corn, 
spirits,  and  herdsmen.  Sometimes  the  dead  were  feigned  to  revive 
with  life  in  the  spring.  At  Athens  they  were  commemorated  in  March 
with  the  earliest  flowers,  when  they  were  thought  to  rise  from  their 
tombs  and  go  about  everywhere  seeking  entrance,  for  the  festivals  of 
the  dead  are  always  those  of  flowers.  Sometimes  potted  grains  and 
flowers  were  fostered  in  every  way  to  accelerate  their  growth,  to  make  all 
herbs  grow  by  homoeopathic  magic,  and  these  were  called  gardens  of 
Adonis.  Personifiers  of  this  revival  were  always  bathed  or  washed  in 
water  or  blood  to  ensure  against  drouth. 

So,  too,  Attis  was  of  virgin  birth,  lover  of  Cybele,  mother  of  gods 
and  goddess  of  fertility,  and  his  cult  was  celebrated  by  eunuch  priests 
who  commemorated  his  tragic  death  and  resurrection.  In  204  b.  c, 
Cybele  and  her  cult  were  brought  from  Phrygia  to  Rome  and  solemnly 
inaugurated  on  the  Palatine  Hill  in  April.  The  next  year  the  crops 
were  abundant,  so  that  henceforth  thib  festival  took  a  very  strong  hold 
upon  the  Romans.  Before  the  effigy  of  Attis's  corpse  the  priest  shed 
some  of  his  own  blood  with  barbaric  music  and  frenzied  dances.  The 
image  of  Attis  was  taken  from  the  sacred  tree  to  which  it  was  swathed, 
and  reverently  buried,  and  there  were  mourning  and  fasting.  But 
suddenly  at  night  a  light  was  struck,  the  tomb  opened,  and  the  god 
was  found  to  have  arisen.  The  priest  touched  the  lips  of  the  mourners 
with  balm  and  whispered  in  their  ears  the  glad  tidings  of  salvation. 


720  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

His  resurrection  was  a  promise  to  his  disciples  that  they  should  rise 
from  the  grave.  The  next  day  the  resurrection  of  the  god  was  cele- 
brated with  carnival,  license,  masquerades.  The  following  day  was 
for  repose,  and  the  next  and  last  was  marked  by  processions  of  barefoot 
nobles  to  the  banks  of  the  Arno,  where  the  image  was  bathed  and  the 
wounds  and  blood  were  forgotten.  A  bull  was  butchered  on  a  high 
grating,  and  the  devotees  with  wreathed  fillets  stood  below  to  be 
drenched  in  the  hot  blood,  and  thus  sins  were  washed  away.  The  fic- 
tion of  a  new  birth,  too,  was  kept  up  for  a  time  by  requiring  of  the 
initiate  a  diet  of  milk  like  a  babe.  For  a  long  time  thus  the  remission 
of  sins  by  the  blood  of  a  bull  was  dramatically  represented  on  the 
Vatican  Hill,  on  the  very  spot  where  now  stands  the  Basilica  of  Saint 
Peter.  Attis  was  originally  a  tree  spirit,  then  a  corn  aind  grain  god, 
tied  to  or  burned  on  a  Maypole,  which  stood  for  a  holy  tree.  Castra- 
tion and  the  burial  or  burning  of  various  parts  were  to  impregnate  the 
earth,  and  the  same  is  true  of  all  kinds  of  bloodletting  in  religious  ser- 
vice. Slowly,  however,  the  ceremonies  that  symbolized  fertility  of 
soil  were  given  another  meaning,  viz.,  a  new  and  higher  birth  of  the 
soul,  so  that  these  ancient  cults  preformed  the  way  for  Christianity. 
No  Oriental  worship  at  Rome  was  so  popular  as  that  of  Attis  and  Cy- 
bele,  or  did  so  much  to  undermine  the  older  Greek  and  Roman  cult  by 
teaching  the  salvation  of  the  individual  soul  as  the  supreme  end  of  Ufe. 
Of  course  there  are  many  missing  Hnks  in  this  reconstruction,  but 
there  are  also  glimpses  of  connection  with  things  so  diverse  as  the  story 
of  Marsyas  bound  to  a  tree  and  flayed  alive,  probably  a  double  of  Attis. 
So  Odin's  victims,  and  once  he  himself,  were  hanged  on  a  sacred  tree 
and  wounded  with  a  spear,  as  Artemis  was  hanged  in  her  own  sacred 
grove.  Later  the  Persian  worship  of  Mithra  became  immensely  popu- 
lar at  Rome,  and  it  resembled  Christianity  even  more,  perhaps,  than 
it  did  the  cult  of  Attis,  so  much  so  that  Christian  scholars  called  it  a 
trick  of  the  de\il  to  seduce  people  from  the  true  fold  by  a  close  imita- 
tion of  it.  Its  solemn  ritual,  too,  was  full  of  aspiration  for  moral 
purity  and  eternal  life,  and  it  universally  fell  on  Christmastide  instead 
of  Easter.  The  Church  of  course  accommodated,  adapted,  adopted, 
and  this  was  at  once  its  strength  and  its  weakness. 

Osiris  was  perhaps  the  most  popular  of  all  the  deities  of  ancient 
Egypt,  and  his  death  and  resurrection  were  annually  celebrated  with 
sorrow  succeeded  by  joy,  although  this  was  originally  only  a  dramatiza- 


DEATH  AND  RESURRECTION  OF  JESUS  721 

tion  of  seedtime  and  harvest.    He  was  the  son  of  an  earth-god  and  a 
sky-goddess.    He  became  king  and  gkve  the  previously  savage  and 
cannibal  Egyptians  law  and  worship.    Isis,  his  wife-sister,  introduced 
the  culture  of  wheat  and  barley,  and  made  the  people  vegetarians, 
while  Osiris  domesticated  the  vine.    Then  both  went  over  the  world 
civilizing  everywhere.    Osiris's  brother  proved  a  usurper,  and  made  a 
precious  coffin  for  him;  and  on  their  return,  when  all  were  merry, 
he  proposed  that  each  should  try  it,  which  they  did  in  turn.    When 
Osiris  lay  in  it,  it  fitted  exactly,  and  the  usurper  slammed  down  the 
lid,  soldered  it,  and  flung  it  into  the  Nile.    Isis  wandered  far,  weeping 
and  seeking  the  body,  which  had  floated  to  Syria,  where  a  tree  shot 
up  that  entombed  the  coffin  in  its  trunk,  which  a  king  cut  and  made  a 
pillar  in  his  house.    Isis  followed  it  and  mourned  by  its  side;  she  was 
accepted  as  a  nurse  in  the  house,  and  finally  was  given  the  coffin, 
took  it  home,  opened  it,  kissed  the  body,  mourned,  and  was  about  to 
revive  it,  but  Typhon  found  it  and  tore  it  into  fourteen  parts,  so  that 
there  are  fourteen  shrines  of  Osiris  to-day  in  Egypt.    Orthodox  Egyp- 
tian tradition  says  that  the  grief  of  this  dolorous  mother  induced  the 
sun-god  Ra  to  send  down  Anubis  who  gathered  and  swathed  the 
scattered  parts  of  the  body,  observed  all  the  rites  over  them,  and  fanned 
the  clayey  remains  with  wings  till  at  last  Osiris  revived  and  returned 
as  king  both  of  the  upper  earth  and  among  the  dead.    He  became  Lord 
of  Eternity,  ruler  of  the  lower  regions,  where  he  judges  and  rewards  all 
soXils  after  death  according  to  their  merits.     The  morality  of  the 
Egyptian  Book  of  the  Dead  is  very  like  that  of  Jesus,  and  those  who 
are  acquitted  live  in  a  land  of  indescribable  fertility  and  beauty  where 
men  and  animals  are  young  and  fair,  and  there  is  eternal  verdure.    In 
Osiris's  resurrection  the  Egyptians  see  a  pledge  of  their  own  immortal- 
ity: "As  surely  as  Osiris  fives  I  shaU  live."    Befief  in  resurrection 
is  suggested  by  the  custom  of  embalming,  which  was  physically  very 
like  that  of  Osiris.    Mourning  for  him  began  when  the  Nile  began  to 
rise.    Then  the  dams  were  ceremonially  cut  and  the  soil  became  the 
bride  of  the  Nile.    Seed-sowing  was  in  autumn,  and  was  sad;  for 
planting,  as  among  primitive  people  to-day,  suggests  the  burial,  and 
is  often  connected  with  the  festival  of  the  dead.    Thus  representatives 
of  potentates  are  often  kiUed,  dismembered,  or  burned  to  increase  the 
fertifity  of  the  soil,  so  that  in  Egypt  special  precaurions  were  taken  that 
bodies  be  not  cut  up  and  their  fragments  used  as  tafismans  for  this 


722  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

purpose.  Osiris  was  originally  a  tree  spirit,  and  pillars  solemnly 
erected  to  him  were  symbols  of  resurrection.  Even  from  this  so  bald 
sketch  we  can  gUmpse  the  culture  atmosphere  which  pervades  so  much 
of  Christianity,  and  can  see  that  not  only  in  the  regions  which 
Jesus  knew  but  perhaps  still  more  in  those  which  Paul  knew  and 
where  the  Church  first  had  its  development,  these  cults  were  de- 
veloped in  both  their  higher  and  lowest  forms,  and  their  influence  was 
very  pervasive. 

Now  the  above  death  and  resurrection  motifs  which  have  had 
such  polymorphic  expression,  and  the  partial  impulsions  of  which  are 
so  effectively  syncretized  into  the  story  of  the  cross,  express  in  symbolic 
form  the  most  essential  philosophy  of  human  life.  To  understand  it 
takes  us  nearest  to  the  noetic  core  of  the  supreme  problem  of  the  na- 
ture, meaning,  and  purpose  of  human  life,  and  to  feel  it  with  correct 
orientation  gives  the  right  Einstellung  to  duty  and  the  practical  con- 
duct of  Hfe.  It  is  just  here  that  we  are  having  most  helpful  genetic 
insights  which  may  be  roughly  indicated  somewhat  as  follows: 

First,  we  must  postulate  that  something  happened  very  early  in 
man's  career  to  disturb  his  harmony  with  nature  such  as  animals  still 
have,  and  to  make  his  life  more  or  less  anxious,  conscious,  and  uncer- 
tain. He  had  to  leave  paradise  and  apply  himself  to  the  work  of 
restoration.  As  himself  the  apex  of  evolution  and  thus  the  chief 
bearer  of  its  highest  momentum,  he  must  transcend  the  animal  plane 
and  forge  his  way  on  and  up  with  constant  effort  and  danger  both  of 
error  and  arrest.  On  the  one  hand  he  had  not  only  all  the  animal  in- 
stincts, some  of  them  perverted  or  hypertrophied,  but  he  also  felt  the 
nisus  of  development  beyond  them  and  a  desire  for  perfecting  himself 
along  with  a  corresponding  horror  of  inferiority,  while  the  strength  and 
often  the  gratification  of  his  baser  propensities  gave  him  a  now  vague 
and  now  acute  sense  of  unworthiness  and  sin.  The  impulse  to  improve 
and  ascend  is,  despite  all,  the  most  constant  and  deepest  thing  in  the 
human  soul,  and  out  of  this  has  grown  every  beneficent  human  insti- 
tution, family,  society,  state,  culture,  and  religion.  Moral  autonomy 
has  been  both  the  efficient  and  the  final  cause  of  all  these,  and  to  this 
end  Mansoul  has  through  the  ages  slowly  evolved  language,  art,  science, 
gods,  demons,  mythologies,  rites,  cults,  and  even  consciousness  itself, 
by  the  slow  and  costly  method  of  trial  and  error,  for  all  these  are  at 
bottom  pragmatic. 


DEATH  AND  RESURRECTION  OF  JESUS  723 

In  such  a  being  every  step  of  advance  involves  some  sacrifice  of 
a  lower  to  a  higher  good.  As  birth  itself  brings  harder  conditions,  so 
every  stage  of  growth  means  renunciation  of  more  infantile  conditions. 
As  the  child  is  weaned,  gets  out  of  the  nursery,  and  then  the  home, 
parental  influences  wane,  and  the  time  comes  when  he  must  leave  all 
this  and  set  up  for  himself.  So,  too,  he  must  constantly  sacrifice  not 
only  childish  wishes  but  allurements  to  linger  on  lower  stages  of  develop- 
ment and  to  indulge  propensities  which  should  be  sublimated.  Ad- 
vancement is  hard,  but  both  sin  and  psychic  disorders  or  arrest  ensue 
if  advance  is  not  constantly  made,  for  there  are  countless  forms  of 
arrest,  which  is  impossible  without  regression.  All  this  is  on  the  anal- 
ogy of  rudimentary  organs  and  functions  which  must  be  developed  in 
their  nascent  period  only  to  be  reduced  or  made  over  into  higher  organs 
and  functions  later.  Thus  biologically,  psychogenetically,  and  morally, 
men  can  only  "rise  on  stepping-stones  of  their  dead  selves,"  and 
growth  is  always  moulting  the  tissues  and  processes  that  illustrate 
this  metamorphosis.  One  of  the  prime  traits  of  savage  life  is  that  it  is 
pervaded  in  every  department  by  taboos  or  "  Thou  shalt  nots."  These 
prohibitions  abound  concerning  food,  sex,  rulers,  all  relations  of  co- 
members  of  the  tribe  to  one  another,  war,  industry,  etc.,  and  they 
altogether  show  not  only  the  manifold  restraints  but  the  tremendous 
energy  with  which  man  enforces  them  upon  himself.  Thus  human  life 
has  always  tended  to  hedge  itself  in  by  restrictions  upon  its  freedom, 
which  instead  of  facilitating  have  often  hindered  its  further  normal 
development  because  there  were  so  many  things  in  themselves  proper 
and  perhaps  needful  that  were  not  permitted  or  were  disallowed;  for 
customs,  stronger  and  before  law,  are  always  enforcing  every  such 
licet  aut  non  licet.  Psychoanalysis  holds  against  Wundt  that  these  rude 
and  often  disastrously  perverted  impulses  preceded  the  development  of 
deities  or  demons  that  could  reward  or  punish,  and  that  such  beings 
were  only  projections  into  the  objective  sphere  of  agencies  that  were 
primarily  subjective  to  enforce  man's  primal  sense  of  what  he  ought  or 
ought  not  to  do.  From  the  very  first  man  felt  that  he  should  not 
murder,  commit  incest,  injure  the  dead,  chiefs,  priests,  or  medicine 
men,  etc.,  all  of  which  are  hedged  in  by  countless  taboos;  and  so  slowly 
and  unconsciously  his  creative  soul  evolved  supernal  agencies  to  en- 
force these  prohibitions,  and  this  man  did  because  he  had  first  of  aU 
developed  an  abhorrence  of  \iolating  the  unwritten  codex  or  taboo 


724  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

that  originally  worked  automatically  and  executed  itself.  Thus  rever- 
ence and  aversion  combined  to  restrict  very  many  natural  mclinations. 
But  all  the  conflicts  that  thus  arose  were  at  first  endopsychic,  and  they 
were  given  external  embodiments  for  the  sake  of  better  Einstellung  and 
because  of  the  persistent  habit  of  extradition  of  consciousness  which 
man  owes  to  the  functioning  of  his  senses.  In  neurotics  every  phase 
of  these  conflicts  can  be  seen  writ  large.  Thus  there  is  a  striking  simi- 
larity in  their  fundamental  operations  between  primitive  men,  most 
forms  of  mental  alienation,  children,  etc.,  and  about  every  mechanism 
found  in  the  one  is  also  operative  in  the  others. 

Now,  whenever  a  strong  taboo  is  violated,  the  primitive  sense  of 
guilt  arises  and  the  need  of  atonement  is  felt,  so  that  sacrifice  and 
offering  must  be  made  or  penance  done  to  make  good  the  wrong  act, 
thought,  or  even  inclination.  It  is  hard  for  us  to  realize  the  intensity 
of  this  experience  in  the  early  history  of  mankind,  which  so  pervaded 
and  dominated  all  his  activities,  his  myths,  rites,  and  primitive  culture 
generally,  all  of  which  we  are  just  now  beginning  to  see  were  full  of  it. 
Indeed,  this  interpretation  of  the  pristine  sense  of  guilt  affords  us  a 
new  key  to  explain  most  of  the  fundamental  elements  of  antique  culture 
as  well  as  many  of  the  chief  forms  of  modern  psychosis.  The  savage 
warrior  does  penance  to  the  ghosts  of  those  he  has  slain,  undergoes  long 
and  painful  ceremonies  of  purification  for  the  violation  of  countless 
and  often  absurd  prescriptions,  mutilates  his  body,  offers  his  fruits, 
treasures,  kine,  and  even  human  beings,  to  appease  the  higher  powers 
whom  he  thinks  he  has  offended.  Holocausts  are  offered,  or  the  peni- 
tent denies  himself  food,  renounces  the  vita  sexualis,  makes  over  his 
possessions,  abandons  his  fondest  inclinations,  all  in  order  to  escape  a 
bad  conscience  and  the  intolerable  anxiety  it  causes.  Ancient  legends 
and  superstitions  abound  in  depictions,  often  in  very  symboHc  language, 
of  this  sense  that  the  right  way  has  been  lost  and  of  the  desire  to  find  it 
that  the  soul  may  rest  again.  Christianity  has  so  tended  to  weaken 
this  old  dread  of  sin  and  its  penalty  that  even  those  who  have  not 
adopted  it  in  the  technical  sense  that  the  Church  demands  illustrate 
how  the  long  and  bitter  struggle  to  be  justified  by  the  supreme  powers 
has  so  lapsed  that  it  is  hard  for  us  to  believe  or  realize  its  pristine  in- 
tensity. We  might  even  roughly  say  that  the  atoning  work  of  Jesus 
has  been  so  effective  or  so  deeply  brought  home  to  the  world  during  all 
these  centuries  since  his  death  that  under  its  influence  men  have  even 


DEATH  AND  RESURRECTION  OF  JESUS  725 

lost  sight  of  the -pathetic  state  of  mind  of  their  forbears  from  which  it 
has  rescued  them. 

All  dragons,  serpents,  vampires,  and  other  monsters  slain  by 
heroes,  and  also  all  flagellations  and  self-mutilations  by  frenzied 
priests  are  at  root  symbolic  expressions  of  the  effort  of  man  or  of  the 
gods  he  has  made  in  his  own  image  as  his  totemic  Doppelgdnger  to 
sacrifice  their  lower  animal  nature  or  their  infantile  personality  in  the 
interests  of  their  higher  development,  which  must  be  done  unless,  as  in 
dementia  praecox,  there  is  regression  to  the  old  subjectivity.    But  what 
is  offered  up  always  comes  back  in  higher  form,  and  this  is  resurrection. 
Gross  love,  if  repressed,  returns  in  the  form  of  love  and  service  of  God 
and  man.     Coarse  appetite  for  food,  if  restrained,  revives  in  spiritual 
or  mental  hunger.    Each  lower  impulse  has  a  higher  psychokinetic 
equivalent,  the  development  of  which  is  the  inner  meaning  and  moral 
of  every  planting  or  seed  burial,  and  subsequent  sprouting,  which 
despite  its  first  economic  meaning  which  began  with  the  very  domesti- 
cation of  plants,  soon  came  to  be  pressed  into  the  higher  service  of 
expressing  man's  need  of  mortifying  his  crude  lower  desires  that  they 
may  spring  up  and  bear  fruits  in  due  season  in  the  loftier  psychic  realm. 
Every  expropriation  of  possession  to  the  gods  or  their  priests,  every 
lustration  or  ceremonial  washing,  every  libation  of  wine  or  of  blood  and 
flesh-burning  upon  altars,  every  offering  of  doves,  lambs,  bulls,  or 
human  victims,  is  in  order  that  man  may  square  himself  or  set  himself 
right  with  the  higher  powers  which  are  always  and  everywhere  projec- 
tions of  his  own  conscience.    Many  of  even  his  worst  phobias  are  ex- 
pressions of  conscience-made  cowardice.    From  the  old  Akkadian 
dread  of  the  awful  Maskim,  the  Semitic  conscience  slowly  evolved  all 
the  rituals  of  purgation  to  propitiate  conscience  and  expiate  sin.    The 
mysterium  Mythraicum  centred  upon  the  same  theme  and  approached 
nearest  to  the  Christian  sacraments.    The  Dionysian  and  Orphic  cults 
and  the  Eleusinian  mysteries  were  those  of  the  death  of  the  lower  and 
birth  into  the  higher  hfe.    The  dying  of  vegetation  in  the  fall  and  its 
revival  in  the  spring,  and  even  the  daily  setting  and  rising  of  the  sun 
were  also  pressed  into  service  as  symbols  of  redemption  from  sin. 
All  are  paradigms  of  renunciation  of  a  lower  for  the  attainment  of  a 
higher  end.    The  purpose  of  the  old  chthonian  rituals  (the  dacia,  antis- 
theria,  and  the  thargelia)  was  apotropic  or  to  effect  riddance,  exorcism, 
or  avoidance  of  evil.    The  novitiate  who  had  once  carried  the  sacred 


726  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

liknon  cried  out,  "Death  is  life,  life  is  death,"  or,  "Bad  have  I  fled, 
better  have  I  found."  Where  Buddhistic  elements  enter  man  con- 
ceives himself  as  evolving  by  his  own  merits  in  choosing  the  good  and 
avoiding  the  bad  through  all  the  orders  of  transmigration  from  the  lowest 
to  the  highest.  Even  inebriation  is  often  a  symbol  of  spiritual  ecstasy 
due  to  the  sense  of  having  transcended  the  range  of  lower  temptations. 
Jesus'  stupendous  problem  was  to  rid  man  of  this  awful  obsession 
of  sin,  and  to  devise  and  make  effective  a  practical  psychotherapy  of 
release  and  salvation.  First  of  all  there  must  be  a  new  orientation  as 
to  what  was  really  right  and  wrong,  and  this  he  could  give  only  by  a 
teaching  which  showed  duties  in  their  true  perspective,  gave  a  correct 
table  of  values,  and  replaced  formal  by  real  moral  distinctions.  But 
in  addition  to  this  there  must  be  a  removal  of  the  sense  of  long-accumu- 
lated hereditary  guilt  and  apprehensiveness.  How  could  the  pall  of 
depressive  gloom  be  removed  so  that  man  could  feel  justified  and  freed 
from  the  enmity  of  the  higher  powers?  It  was  just  there  that  Jesus, 
on  the  basis  of  the  widespread  atonement  ideas  and  cults,  found  the 
way  that  it  is  the  glory  of  Christianity  to  have  opened.  He  would 
personate  all  the  victims  ever  offered  to  propitiate  the  gods;  would  be 
the  totemic  embodiment  of  all  the  first-fruits,  gifts,  animals,  captives 
or  kings,  real  or  fictive,  ever  slain  for  remission;  would  take  upon 
himself  all  the  wounds,  stuprations,  and  tortures  of  body  or  soul  ever 
inflicted  upon  men  by  themselves  or  others,  in  order  to  placate  wrath 
or  even  the  scales  of  justice.  He  would  be  not  a  reluctant  but  a  glad 
and  voluntary  victun,  surrendering,  as  few  of  even  human  victims  had 
done,  the  very  will  to  Uve  itself,  choosing  freely  the  most  painful  and 
disgraceful  death,  renouncing  even  the  hope  of  a  future  life,  and  feeling 
forsaken  and  accursed  of  God  and  man,  in  a  word,  dying  a  death  more 
pathetic  than  any  had  ever  died  before,  dooming  himself,  if  need  be,  to 
utter  extinction  or  to  eternal  torment  as  heaven  willed,  by  an  act  of 
supreme  self-immolation.  Moreover,  his  perfect  innocence  and  abound- 
ing virtue  made  this  supreme  sacrifice  still  more  complete  and  ideally 
perfect.  Thus  he  underwent  every  possible  punishment  and  suffered 
every  penalty  at  once,  as  if  he  were  the  incarnation  of  every  possible 
vice,  crime,  or  sin.  The  best  suffered  the  worst  in  the  acme  of  injustice. 
All  the  accumulated  wrath  of  the  higher  powers  was  concentrated  and 
vented  upon  the  paragon  of  human  virtue  and  perfection.  Only  by 
the  conception  and  the  objective  and  dramatic  representation  of  a 


DEATH  AND  RESURRECTION  OF  JESUS  727" 

perfect  and  also  a  totemic  paragon  of  humanity,  invested  with  the 
supreme  aura  of  divinity,  honoris  causa,  brought  from  the  heights  of 
heaven  to  the  depths  of  hell,  could  man  be  made  to  feel  that  the  accu- 
mulated wrath  augmented  by  sin  ever  since  the  fall  was  at  last  com- 
pletely discharged,  and  that  the  higher  powers  could  henceforth  be 
conceived  as  innocuous  and  man  as  immune  from  the  curse  of  guilt  un- 
der which  he  had  cowered.  The  long  tragedy  that  began  in  the  coimcil 
of  heaven  when  the  Son  determined  to  go  down  to  earth  to  take  on  the 
form  of  man,  and  which  culminated  at  Golgotha  and  in  the  tomb, 
showed  in  the  most  appalling  way,  once  and  for  all,  what  God  thought 
and  felt  about  sin,  because  he  both  required  such  a  victim  and  had  so 
completely  accepted  and  ovenvhelmed  it.  The  age-long  complex  of 
guilt  and  fear  was  here  fully  brought  up  into  consciousness,  and  by 
being  objectified  was  thereby  made  evictable,  so  that  the  cure  of  the 
obsession  was  brought  within  man's  reach.  The  sense  of  sin  and 
atonement  are  like  all-pervasive  chemical  elements  which  because  of 
their  intense  affinities  are  hard  to  isolate,  but  which  are  here  for  a  mo- 
ment seen  in  their  free,  pure,  nascent  state,  as  moral  elements  that 
pervade  all  human  experience. 

What  now  remains  for  man  to  do  is  to  realize  that  the  whole  proc- 
ess is  endopsychic;  that  it  is  at  root  an  autosoteriological  process; 
that  the  great  tragedy  is  not  an  outer  spectacle,  but  a  symbolization  of 
an  inner  process  of  self-katharsis  which  Mansoul  has  achieved;  that 
pity  for  Jesus'  agonies  is  really  self-pity;  and  that  "the  suffering  ser- 
vant" of  Yahveh  is  in  very  fact  and  truth  man  himself,  whose  release  is 
really  achieved  only  when  he  repeats  the  act  of  self -purgation  in  himself. 
Only  because  of  man's  persistent  ejective  habit  of  thought  is  it  hard  to 
realize  that  it  is  all  only  a  projection  into  the  field  of  history  of  an  internal 
process,  and  that  the  precious  symbols  of  ransom  and  vicarious  atone- 
ment are  necessary,  and  that  man  has  been  so  persistently  prone  to  think 
himself  saved  from  without  by  the  imputation  of  an  alien  righteousness. 

Again,  the  psychology  of  anger  shows  that  when  it  has  flamed  forth 
with  abandon,  and  especially  toward  an  innocent  and  lovable  being,  it 
is  followed  by  an  ambivalent  wave  of  pity  and  perhaps  love.  The 
tragedy  of  Calvary  makes  man  impute  the  same  process  to  the  soul  of 
God,  so  that  a  new  dispensation  of  benignity  succeeds  that  of  wrath 
and  punishment,  as  if  the  mind  of  the  divine  being  had  been  converted 
to  a  new  attitude  toward  man.    This  means  that  sympathetic  par- 


728  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

ticipation  in  the  story  of  the  cross  brmgs  a  new  attitude  of  man  toward 
himself.  He  has  evicted  the  old  dread,  and  in  so  doing  his  own  soul 
is  resurrected.  The  real  Resurrection  thus  is  not  an  achievement  of 
Jesus.  But  what  man  has  done  for  his  ideal  self,  symbolized  ob- 
jectively by  the  Resurrection,  he  has  ascribed  to  Jesus,  now  inwardly 
seen  to  be  his  own  alter  ego  and  the  ideal  renouncer  of  all  regressive 
tendencies.  Eucharistic  bread  and  wine,  the  baptism,  all  survivals  of 
the  old  and  world-wide  blood  covenants  and  haotna  cults,  and  aU  the 
copious  imagery  of  Paul  and  of  the  Fourth  Gospel  touching  incorpora- 
tion and  identification  with  Jesus,  are  precious  rituals,  symbols,  and 
types  of  the  psychologic  fact  that  Jesus  is  in  very  truth  the  incarnation 
of  man's  better  self,  purified  of  sin,  and  that  Jesus'  Resurrection  is  not 
a  fait  accompli  but  a  perennial  duty  of  all  believers.  All  these  rites 
thus  are  so  many  invocations  to  resubjectify  the  processes  of  salvation.* 
All  that  is  of  value  in  human  life  strikes  its  roots  deep  into  our 
instinctive  nature,  and  what  rises  highest  has  the  deepest  and  oldest 
roots.  This  shows  the  need  of  constant  transformation  of  all  that 
is  best  in  us  into  ever-higher  and  more  sublimated  forms.  There  must 
be  incessant  new  adjustments  and  finer  adaptations.  Sin  is  failure  to 
hold  to  new  insights  and  ideas,  and  this  causes  uncertainty  and  failure 
of  the  power  to  put  them  to  work.  Failure  to  make  these  most-needed 
readjustments  brings  a  sense  of  anxiety  closely  allied  to  guilt,  into  which 
it  easily  passes  over,  and  misfortune  often  arouses  or  deepens  a  sense 
of  guilt.  In  this  tense  state  the  soul  sometimes  yields  to  and  carries 
out  some  base  impulsion,  and  this  arouses  into  action  the  next  higher 
power  that  controls  the  impulse,  so  that  such  lapses  may  issue  in  the 
renunciation  of  the  base  tendency.  This  is,  however,  a  dangerous 
way  of  making  sin  abound  that  grace  may  the  more  abound,  and  we 
think  of  the  great  sinners  who  have  been  saved  by  a  great  salvation. 
In  the  struggle  to  be  released  from  the  body  of  death,  the  soul  for  whom 
these  processes  are  objectified  projects  into  God  his  own  wish  to  punish, 
and  expects  him  to  avenge  what  he  would,  but  cannot.  It  is  just  the 
sins  we  are  inclined  to  that  we  are  most  anxious  for  him  to  punish.  The 
vindictive  God  thus  expresses  man's  sometimes  almost  Sadistic  rage 
against  his  own  faults.  In  his  reprobation  of  sin  we  mirror  our  own 
abhorrence  of  it.    Thus  we  are  both  punisher  and  victim.    Again,  we 

'See  J.  C.  Goetz:  "Die  Abendmahlsfrage  in  ihrer  geschichtliche  Entwicklune,"  Leipzig,  igod,  311  PP-;  also,  Her- 
man SchulUe:  "Zur  Lehrer  iler  heiligen  Abendmahl/'  1886;  also  Schweitjcr:  '^'Der  AbendmahJ,  looi.  See,  too, 
UUinann's  "The  Sinlessness  of  Jesus";  also  Bartcl's  "Die  Medizin  der  Naturv6lker."  Leipzig,  1903;  and  Peters'  "Aus 
Dbumaxeutiscber  Vorzeit,"  1886. 


DEATH  AND  RESURRECTION  OF  JESUS  729 

may  wreak  vengeance  upon  innocent  objects  by  transfer,  when  we  are 
really  wroth  only  at  ourselves.  Thus  the  guilty  conscience  makes 
scapegoats  or  vicariates  for  its  own  ill  deserts.  All  offerings  to  the 
gods  are  not  only  self-penalizations,  because  they  involve  sacrifice  of 
personal  or  communal  goods,  which  are  expropriated,  but  we  feel  and 
express  our  resentment  in  the  obloquy  and  cruelty  we  mete  out  to  the 
proxy  of  our  sins.  Thus  Mansoul  is  bifrontic.  Man  punishes  himself, 
and  Paul  was  logical  in  inferring  that  if,  as  the  whole  Hebrew  scheme  of 
sacrifice  implied,  guilt  and  punishment  could  be  transferred,  merit 
could  also  be  transferred.  So,  too,  the  sinlessness  of  Jesus  meant  that 
man  felt  that  there  was  a  bottom  core  of  goodness  in  his  own  nature 
beneath  all  the  guilt,  and  that  when  all  its  guilt  and  sin  had  been  purged 
away  and  atoned,  this  would  shine  forth  as  if  resurrected  from  the  dead. 
Thus  Paul's  theory  of  vicariousness  was  after  all  a  concession  to  the 
hardness  of  men's  hearts  and  the  blindness  of  their  minds,  because 
Jesus  is  at  bottom  not  a  substitute.  He  is  in  very  deed  ipsissimal  man 
himself,  and  all  that  happened  or  was  done  for  the  one  was  also  done 
for  the  other.  Thus  Jesus'  fate  was  only  an  allegory  of  what  really 
transpures  in  every  soul  that  becomes  regenerate  and  finds  again  the 
lost  trail.  The  sarcous  man  dies,  and  the  pneumatic  man  arises  in  his 
place,  reformed,  reoriented,  and  reconstellated. 

For  long  evolutionary  ages,  probably  since  the  troglodytes,  the 
chief  fact  in  the  psychic  history  of  man  was  his  uncertainty  and  fear 
concerning  his  own  place  in  the  universe.  Long  and  hard  had  been 
his  struggle  for  survival  with  the  formidable  animal  forms  that  would 
not  recognize  him  as  lord  of  creation.  Nature  visited  him  also  with 
storm,  flood,  drouth,  famine,  disease;  the  fruits  of  the  earth  were  un- 
certain; enemies  lurked  about;  and  instead  of  being  in  a  lawful  cosmos 
his  ignorance  made  his  world  full  of  mysterious  and  capricious  forces 
which  were  really  of  his  own  creation,  so  that  his  mind  was  saturated 
with  superstitious  dreads.  He  must  be  incessantly  circumspect,  and 
every  calamity  that  befell  him,  even  death,  was  due  to  his  own  fault, 
and  very  likely  was  the  retributive  act  of  invisible  personalities.  Per- 
haps he  felt  that  his  predecessors  had  offended;  but  certainly  he  felt 
that  he  had,  and  that  he  was  constantly  liable  to  offend  the  powers  that 
shaped  his  fate.  We  probably  have  in  the  analyses  of  neuroses  with 
compulsive  ideas  a  very  good  survival  of  this  old  savage  conception  of 
sin  and  its  dangers,  and  ways  to  avoid  it.    Now  nothing  is  so  provoca- 


730  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

tive  of  projection  as  this  sense  of  guilt.  Evil  must  be  extradited,  and 
so,  as  Wundt  shows,  bad  demons  were  projected  before  the  benign  gods, 
and  it  needed  but  little  secondary  working  over  of  these  outward 
expressions  of  this  conflict  in  his  own  soul  to  develop  and  establish 
the  conception  of  a  dual  world  ruled  by  two  groups  of  powers,  one 
friendly  and  the  other  hostile.  When  this  was  done  the  unconscious 
processes  in  man's  soul  became  more  accessible,  and  instead  of  impera- 
tive psychoses  there  were  commands  or  prohibitions  from  without  to 
check,  and  some  to  facilitate,  the  expression  of  man's  impulses.  Sym- 
bols and  dreams  although  these  powers  were,  they  were  very  efficient 
for  control.  That  man  did  not,  however,  entirely  resign  the  con- 
trol of  himself  to  his  gods  is  seen  by  the  beUef  in  the  omnipotence  of 
his  own  thought  or  wish,  traces  of  which  we  can  still  see  in  infancy, 
but  which  have  their  chief  illustration  in  magic,  by  which  man  directs 
the  action  of  gods.  If  he  had  forgotten  that  the  supernal  powers  were 
made,  warp  and  woof,  out  of  his  own  soul-stuff,  and  had  never  begun 
to  realize  how  solipsistic  he  had  been,  and  never  consciously  said  "All 
this  transcendental  universe,  it  is  I,"  he  nevertheless  drew  the  prag- 
matic moral  of  this  fact  in  the  behef  that  by  manifold  and  fit  spells, 
incantations,  and  later  by  rites,  ceremonies,  and  prayers,  he  could  con- 
strain the  high  powers. 

Very  slowly,  particularly  in  the  Hebrew  consciousness  and  in  the 
patriarchal  age,  the  concepts  of  good  as  over  against  bad  powers  had 
been  fused  together  in  one  unitary,  monotheistic  idea,  fashioned  on  the 
pattern  of  the  father  and  headsman  of  the  pastoral  tribe,  who  was  both 
loved  and  dreaded  with  the  same  feehngs  which  psychoanalysis  shows 
younger  children  still  have  toward  their  father.  All  sin  was  against 
the  God-father,  and  when  the  flesh-and-blood  head  of  the  clan  died  or 
was  slain  (his  slaughter  being  perhaps  the  primal  sin  in  the  world), 
whatever  of  this  God-idea  remained  was  attached  to  the  father  surro- 
gate, totemism  began,  and  religion  began  to  consist  in  identification 
with  the  totem  by  blood  covenants,  by  commensal  eating,  and  in 
sublimation  by  fire,  in  burnt  offerings  and  incense,  with  increasing 
refinement  as  the  God- idea  grew  and  withdrew.^ 

>To  which  we  might  apply  the  language  of  Ariel  in  Shakespeare's  Tempest; 

"  Full  fathom  five  thy  father  lies, 

Of  his  bones  are  coral  made: 
Those  are  pearls  that  were  his  eyes, 

Nothing  of  him  that  doth  fade, 
But  doth  suffer  a  sea-change 
Into  something  rich,  and  strange." 


DEATH  AND  RESURRECTION  OF  JESUS  731 

Thus,  when  Jesus,  the  perfect  totemic  man,  offered  hunself  up 
voluntarily  as  a  sacrifice  and  was  accepted  and  allowed  to  die  as  a 
victim,  the  old  kingdom  of  law  became  bankrupt.  It  had  utterly  and 
hopelessly  failed.  The  Yahveh  of  the  priests  and  Levites  was  dead. 
Like  the  Titans,  he  had  devoured  his  own  offspring,  and  the  tragedy 
of  Golgotha  was  his  funeral.  He  was  slain  by  the  rigorous  execution 
of  his  own  law.  He  had  long  been  an  obsession  from  which  man  was 
now  at  last  released.  Jesus'  death  had  also  been  the  death  of  the 
Ur-Father.  He  would  no  longer  exact  to  the  uttermost  farthing  of  the 
letter  or  take  his  pound  of  flesh.  His  whole  disposition  had  suffered  a 
reducHo  ad  absurdum,^  and  there  was  no  fmrther  raison  d'etre  for  him, 
although  we  see  only  the  ambivalent  side  of  Jesus'  reverence  and  fihal 
devotion  to  him,  for  this  apparently  was  all  that  came  into  Jesus'  own 
consciousness.  It  was  this  tendency  to  cover  up  the  slaughter  of  the 
old  God  which  was  seized  upon  and  greatly  exaggerated,  especially  by 
Paul  and  the  author  of  the  Fourth  Gospel,  who  could  never  conceive 
Jesus  as  a  noble  parricide  who  with  super-Promethean  defiance  had 
challenged  and  slain  the  Deity  of  the  temple  and  the  law.  As  Theseus 
slew  the  Minotaur,  Siegfried  and  Saint  George  the  dragon,  so  Jesus 
had  overcome  the  antiquated  and  cruel  guardian  and  executor  of  the 
law,  and  thereby  released  man  from  his  age-long  sense  of  accumulated 
guilt  and  the  haunting  dread  of  unworthiness  that  it  had  become  the 
chief  function  of  Yahveh  as  well  as  of  all  his  psychogenetic  predecessors 
in  other  races,  back  to  the  first  malign  demons,  to  inculcate.  It  was  a 
supreme  act  of  genius  to  detect  his  vulnerable  point,  of  strategy  to 
find  how  to  reach  it,  and  of  devotion  to  inflict  the  coup  de  grace. 
Originally  a  combination,  as  we  saw,  of  the  good  and  bad  powers  that 
ruled  human  Hf e  into  a  unipersonal  form,  Yahveh  thus  had  degenerated 
from  his  golden  age  into  a  predominantly  malign  being,  fully  ripe  for 
execution.  Jesus'  method  of  accompHshing  this  result  by  drawing  all 
the  venom  out  of  Yahveh  upon  his  own  innocent  self,  so  that  both  died 
together,  was  perhaps  the  supreme  achievement  of  the  human  soul, 
so  that  Jesus'  Resurrection  and  exaltation  to  Supreme  Deity  after- 
ward is  a  monument  that  humanity  had  to  rear  to  this  great  act 
of   deUverance.     Thus    the    concurrent   Einfuhlung,    which    is    in 


»F.  Riklln:  "Betrachtung 
"The  Psychology  of  the  Unconscious 


1003, 680  pp.,  J.  G.  Frazer:  "The  Golden  Bough,"  London,  igoy-iS,  "vol-    b .  t  reud:    i 
Wm.  Ramsay  Smith:  "Lectures  on  the  Religion  of  the  Semites,"  New  York,  18S9, 488  pp. 


732  JESUS  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  PSYCHOLOGY 

fact  the  supreme  test  of  the  real  actual  existence  of  any  person, 
vouches  even  more  strongly  for  the  factuality  of  the  risen  Jesus 
than  it  does  for  the  Jesus  of  Galilee  and  Gethsemane,  and  all 
the  admirable  and  scholarly  argimientation  of  men  like  Lake, 
that  bases  beUef  in  the  risen  Jesus  upon  the  evidence  of  the  empty 
tomb,  must  tend  to  divert  us  from  the  chief  psychodynamic  evidence 
on  which  we  must  mainly  depend  for  the  affirmation  of  that  with- 
out which  "oiu:  faith  is  vain."  Indeed,  at  this  distance  and  hence- 
forth increasingly  and  forever,  the  chief  basis  of  our  belief  in  the 
superhistorical  reality  of  Jesus  is  that  the  folk-soul  being  what  it  is,  he 
had  to  rise. 

On  the  one  hand,  although  Yahveh  had  degenerated  far  toward 
ethical  dotage,  as  compared  with  the  conceptions  of  him  held  in  the 
classic  age  of  prophecy,  and  had  become  vindictive  and  petty,  with 
much  of  the  ceremonial  punctiho  of  senescence,  it  could  never  be  for- 
gotten that  although  he  was  ripe  for  death,  because  there  was  more 
harm  than  good  left  in  him,  he  was  still,  although  defunct,  the  Lord  of 
the  old  covenant  and  of  precious  memories.  Hence,  as  if  dimly  realiz- 
ing the  patricidal  attitude  and  act  to  which  fate  had  destined  him  with 
respect  to  the  God  of  the  Jewish  orthodoxy  of  his  day,  Jesus  had  no 
disposition  to  degrade  Yahveh  to  the  position  of  an  ex-God  or  to 
diabolize  him,  for  Jesus  was  no  usurping  aspirer  for  Godhood  by  dis- 
placing a  predecessor,  as  all  new  gods  had  done  before.  But  by  the 
laws  of  ambivalence  and  compensation  the  better  elements  of  Yahveh's 
nature  were  not  only  conserved  but,  now  that  he  was  gone,  given  a 
loftier  and  far  more  attractive  interpretation  than  ever  before.  Thus, 
along  with  the  accession  of  Jesus  to  plenary  Deity,  not  only  had  the 
better  side  of  the  God-father  idea  been  conserved  but  Yahveh  might 
in  a  sense  be  said  to  have  been  converted  to  a  new  benignity.  He 
was  again  humanized,  refined,  and  exalted.  Thus  God  and  man  were 
each  atoned,  and  the  God-idea  as  well  as  Jesus  was  resurrected  from 
the  dead  in  transfigured  form.  This  was  the  great  reconciUation. 
Thus  the  inmost  soul  of  the  race  was  revealed  and  spoke  as  never 
before  or  since.  The  last  dreary  and  ominous  word  of  the  Old  Testa- 
ment with  which  the  old  dispensation  closed  was  a  threat  which  Mal- 
achi  puts  into  Yahveh's  mouth  "to  come  and  smite  the  earth  with 
a  curse."  But  this  empire  of  fear  was  over,  and  God  in  Christ  had 
reconciled  man  to  himself  in  the  new  liberty  of  the  sons  of  God.    To  all 


DEATH  AND  RESURRECTION  OF  JESUS  733 

who  will  love  and  serve  God  and  God  in  man,  the  old  era,  therefore, 
of  dread,  and  the  incessant  and  interminable  sacrifice  which  began, 
perhaps,  with  the  very  first  and  lowest  man  and  was  world-wide,  was 
over.  Thus  in  raising  Jesus  from  the  dead  Mansoul  raised  both  God 
and  itself,  and  entered  a  new  world  as  a  new  creature. 


THE  END 


7  yC 


THE  COUNTRY  LIFE  PRESS 
GARDEN  CITY,  N.  Y. 


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